


The Dead Season

by galadrieljones



Series: The Dead Season Universe [1]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Arlathan, Arlathan worldbuilding, Backstory, Canon Divergent Fix-it, Complicated Fix-it, Dalish Elves, Dalish Worldbuilding, Dragons, Eluvians, Elvhenan, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Erotica, Established Relationship, F/M, Family Drama, Fist Fights, Hands, Healthy Relationships, Hero's Journey, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Magic, Major canon divergence, Minor Iron Bull/Dorian Pavus, Not Trespasser DLC Compliant, Realism, Rebirth, Redemption, Secret Doorways, Sex as a theme, Smut, Solas is extremely charming, Solas is occasionally reckless af, Solas is only 30, Solas was born, Solas's Hands, The Fade, The Lavellans, The Veil, Touch-Starved, Violence, Worldbuilding, alternate theories, complex characters, complex emotional bonding between men, love comes in many shapes and formulas, mention of miscarriage, repaired relationship, smut with beauty, smut with feelings, wasted youth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-12
Updated: 2018-06-26
Packaged: 2018-07-23 15:14:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 64
Words: 398,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galadrieljones/pseuds/galadrieljones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if Solas had changed his heart? What if he never left? </p><p>Sene and Solas begin their love in the heart of the Inquisition era. It is a season of innocence, full of friends and secrecy in the wild and a sexual awakening for them both. But as reality sets in, and their relationship deepens, Sene and Solas have to face some hard truths. Solas's past is full of sharp angles that start to stick him good, and of course Sene gets caught in the crossfire. No matter how warm the summer days, fall beckons always, and winter is never far behind. To make it through spring, and to achieve the elusive happiness that he has yet to earn, Solas must be a man, and he must come to terms with a violent, tragic past that's haunted him for thousands of years. And in the meantime, there's Sene, who has her own insecurities and her own family dramas to contend with, and there's the Inquisition—a heroic cavalry of friends and a beacon of hope to many, perhaps those highest in its ranks most of all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Jaw

**Author's Note:**

> _The Dead Season_ can be read as five books, all part of one very big, epic, continuous Solavellan tale:
> 
>   * **[Book I](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/16972533)** : _Summer_ (Chapters 1-23)
>   * **[Book II](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/18776155)** : _Fall_ (Chapters 24-35)
>   * **[Book III](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/21133997)** : _Winter_ (Chapters 36-43)
>   * **[Book IV](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/23485371)** : _Spring_ (Chapters 44-54)
>   * **[Book V](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/27048390)** : _Seasons of Love_ (Chapters 55-end)
> 

> 
> All of my Elven is carefully devised and translated via the Elvhen Lexicon by FenxShiral. **Elven translations can be found in the endnotes of relevant chapters.**
> 
> Final Update (7/10) - _[Chapter 64: Awaken](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/34911734)_

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After Wisdom. Solas returns to Skyhold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **BOOK I: SUMMER**

There had been a time when running came naturally to Solas. When it was all he had. As a boy, and as a young man. Before the Veil, in Arlathan, and now, after. When he would fling himself into oblivion and never look back. Reckless, patience unwilling. In this sense, he was just like Sene. So much like Sene. He never knew.

After Wisdom, he'd run. It took him two weeks to make his way back to Skyhold. This is a story for another day, but for now, just know that, the moment he returned, he found her in the kitchens, sitting on a table, eating cookies with Sera, her red hair braided tightly to her head, and she looked at him from across the room and she said, "Solas." Just  _Solas._ His name, clean and hard, the way it lived on her tongue. Like a sea shell. She hopped off the table, and they took a walk in the garden, to discuss things. She had been very worried. She wanted to understand his pain, but he just wanted to be with her. To see her. Make sure she had been real all along. And so he held her hand, and he put the hair behind her ear, and as they stood in a lovely corner where the vines grew long, he kissed her. Spare, present. And he told her that it would be all right, that he would be all right. And then they parted, to tend to their days individually, as there was much to catch up on for Solas: friends and business. Paperwork with Josephine. His absence had been long, so she, of course, wanted a full report. But the kiss, a revelation, was a little red pebble, still caught in his mouth.

In some ways, it had felt like the end of something.

Now, six hours had gone by. The day had gotten away from them both. He went to find her in her quarters like he had on so many occasions before, only this time, he knew that it was different. That things had changed. Their mouths had touched. It was inarguable and real. It was _not_ the Fade. She'd tasted like baking spices, and the garden smelled of pale roses, water and spring. He opened the door. He went inside. At first, she did not hear him.

Seeing her there: she was reading a book, hunched over on the mat in front of the fire. She liked sitting on the floor. He didn't know why. It was where she felt most comfortable, especially when they talked about things of a serious nature. Her red hair that night was down and curly. Big. Wild, like a nest. A place for birds and lovers. He'd never once seen it down before. She seemed particular about her braids. And so finally, he cleared his throat, made himself known, and she looked up, surprised, and she pressed her hands to the top of her head, deep in her hair, as if embarrassed, and this was endearing. It made her seem more real somehow, more shiny and hard, speckled and crisp, as a piece of an apple. Sene.

“You’re here,” she said, almost like a question.

He smiled.

He went and sat down on the mat next to her. He rested his elbows on his knees and watched her from the corner of his eye. She looked at him for a while, but their bond was complicated, and when he didn’t look away, she became a little awkward. She looked at the fire instead, her back straight, holding the book closed in her lap. The book was on the Andrastian faith in Orlais, a tome he’d given her all the way back in Haven. Her interest in religion ran deep, but she maintained a good order of the mind. She was attentive and level, though she had her moments. He had come to know her well. Her edges were frayed. She was fast. She liked faith. She just didn’t always understand it. Blind worship disturbed her. She was young, and her freckles stood out on her nose as if painted, and this—these painted parts, their harmony, amidst the patchwork and the speed and the unshaking curiosity, had always intrigued him. As they'd kissed in the garden, Chantry sisters held the hands of children and showed them how to light the candles. It was Spring. The season was new.

“I wasn't sure if you were coming,” she said. "I would have done something."

"Like what?"

She sort of tugged at her hair, pulled it back behind her ears. "My hair has a mind of its own. It takes a while to tame."

“It is yours,” he said. He looked at her. "It looks good."

She blushed.

"I am here because I've spent all day creating distractions." Solas held out his hands, examined the knuckles. Scar tissue. Old and pink. "But it's been no use. I even went to the Rest to find Blackwall. He taught me to play a game called Diamondback. Do you know it?"

“You played Diamondback with Blackwall?”

“Several times. Though I’m afraid he might have wagered too much.”

“He’s pretty good," said Sene. "I’ve played with him a few times in the stables.”

“Yes, he said so,” said Solas.

“That was nice of you," said Sene. "To spend time with Blackwall. You've been gone but he hasn't been the same since Adamant. Thinking a lot.”

“It is understandable,” he said. “He was glad for the company, as was I.”

“Is that why you're here now?" she said. "For the company?"

“Perhaps,” he said. He looked back to the fire. It was night, dim and warm, with the clean light from the moon clinging to the Frostbacks, reflecting through the glass of the windows, touching everything they touched. There was only her and him and the fire and the light from the mountains. “I had a question,” he said, making conversation, "about your name.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing," he said. "Do you think there's something wrong with your name?"

"Not really. I don't often think about my name."

"I just realized while I was gone that I’ve never heard it before," said Solas.

“My _sal’melin_ is Isene,” she said. “Sene is a just nickname.”

“ _Isene_ ,” said Solas.

“My father writes a lot,” she said. “He is the Archivist for our clan. Sort of like a historian. He didn’t much like the 'I' when I was a kid. Said it was too many syllables for yelling across the farm. He shortened it and called me Sene.”

“It means _like fire_.”

“I know what it means,” she said.

He could see her growing self-conscious the more they talked about it. “I like it. I like Sene, too. Your father is a writer?”

“Not really,” said Sene, scratching at her ear. “I mean, sort of. Mostly, he works with the Keeper now. But he used to write stories when I was a child.”

“You said he's a historian, too,” said Solas. “That is potentially very interesting."

“Seriously?"

"Yes."

She bristled. "You've never asked me about it before. My clan, or my father, or my name. Not really. Not specifically."

“I know," he said. "I am not criticizing, Sene. I’m just curious. I promise.”

“Curious?"

"Yes," he said. "Curious. I am trying to learn."

She smiled down into the floor, nudged him a little with her shoulder. " _Learning_ ," she said.

He smirked, put his face into her hair. “Your name, Sene. It is small and sounds red, like a jewel. I like that it is a new word.”

“Well, thank you,” she said. She turned toward him now, sat on her knees. She put one warm hand, softly, on each of his cheeks, and she turned his head to face her. Her touch undid him slowly. He exhaled. “Solas,” she said, her small, red eyebrows puckered. “What does that mean? Pride?”

“Yes,” he said.

“That's an old name," she said. "More like a word. I've never heard it used as a name like that. Do you like it?"

“It is just a name, Sene.”

She took the jaw that hung around his neck, pressed it with her fingers, the teeth, the smooth lines of the bone. She studied it. “It's interesting," she said. "Solas."

“What are you thinking?" he said.

She looked up at him, slow. Unfolding. "I am thinking that you did not come here to talk about names. Is that why you came here?"

"No."

"Then, why?"

“Because I missed you," he said, taking a piece of her hair between his fingers. "I wanted to see you."

She closed her eyes. She kissed him, full but soft. Familiar. He kissed her back. It was very easy. He held her, drew her closer, held onto her tall, hard body. She was strong and lean, but he was tall, too, and he could diminish her with his shape. Deeper now, they kissed, her hands on the back of his neck, on his face. Everywhere. Something changed. She was fast. She gathered his shirt into her fists and pulled with an unseen strength until she was between his legs, her body pressed into his. He engulfed her. It was how she wanted it, he knew, and how he wanted it, too, as she hastened things. And she was asking something of him now, something more. He had to make a choice.

He took her face in his hands, pulled away, only just. With one hand in her hair, the odd red curls that he took in handfuls, he told her the truth. “I don’t want to stop,” he said.

“Then don’t,” she whispered, her mouth at his ear.

She was aggressive. It was good. She gave him very little time to react, let him feel without thinking. She was a little clumsy, her hands moving on instinct alone, inexperienced, but she was driven, prepared. Very brave. He felt her hand, reaching for him, stiff and unyielding. He steadied against her. They'd never made it this far before.

“Be careful, vhenan," he said.

“I don't feel like being careful,” she said. Her voice low. “ _Isalan ma gara suin em, Solas._ Sometimes, elven is easier. But I am ready. We are ready."

“Are we, _avise'ain_?"

She put her cheek to his, her lips to his ear. This drew a low, low grunt from the back of the throat, full gravel. It excited her.

“ _Felas, vhenan_ ,” he said. "Go slow." He held her face, took it back in his hands, looked at her hard so that she focused. “ _Isene_. Can I call you that?"

"Yes. You can."

"Listen to me, Isene,” he said.

“I have been listening, Solas,” she said. "It's all I do. It's all I've done for months."

“I know. Just one more time. Please?"

“ _Harthan_ , Solas.”

"If we take this path, we cannot go back. Do you understand?”

“Solas,” she said, but he could sense that the elven sounds and glimmers were only wisps now between them now, falling away into the nothing cool of the common language. She was already halfway gone to him. Over time, they'd created a world of their very own, a place to hide from the madness, and this had led them to a kind of freedom. Living felt easier when they were together, and they could rely on one another to pick up the pieces. Their friendship was whole. “I know.”

So he kissed her. And the movements changed—the touching and the games—and as they became something new, something else, Solas began to lose time. It was uncommon for him. But there were only surfaces after that. It's all he could remember: soft and warm, new and dry, hard and wet. Undoing. Quickly.

They got up, and they went to the bed, and she unfolded as a paper crane. Again, it was fast. Sene was fast. Everything she did, she seemed to do without question. She did not carry guilt or regret. She did not care for hindsight. She wore close to nothing that night. A bit of cloth, pajamas. The fire was warm—it was all she needed. Her skin, her wrists and her mouth, all of it ran hot. He was used to her in armors—scales and metals, things that hurt. But tonight, it was all soft. Gray and silk, and a green cotton jacket, the toggles small and shiny like teeth. He took them apart one by one, new in his resolve to end the questioning, and the loneliness, and the fear that he was nobody here, the understanding that everything and everyone he'd ever loved had been lost. Why else had he come to her, day after day, if it wasn't for comfort? He watched her watch him, brave and curious. She slid her arms from the jacket, and he removed it from behind her back, and tossed it to the floor. Her shoulders, freckled as her cheeks, smooth, and he kissed them. This made her close her eyes, and he could tell she wanted to go faster. But he was going slow, did not want to lose this. Not a single breath, or hair, or little green part of her eyes. He pressed her gently to the bed, but he was very serious now as he took down one strap from her blouse, then the other. "Patience, vhenan," he said.

“Okay,” she said, closing her eyes, smiling strangely. She tensed on and off, as a fist opening and closing. Her energies, he could sense them red and wild, little sparks coming off in the shapes of butterflies.

“Are you nervous?" he said into her hair.

“Not really,” she said, still smiling. "I'm just me."

He smiled. It was so true. So he tugged her out of her blouse, which came away easy, showing her to him—everything, parts he’d only imagined, seen in hard, all-consuming wet dreams as they hit him in waves during the past two weeks he'd spent without her. He undid the buttons at her waist, and she opened her eyes when she felt his touch and propped up on her elbows to watch. "Are you going to take them off?" she said.

He almost started laughing. "Yes, vhenan," he said. He smirked and traced his knuckles from her hip bones up the full length of her body. He put them into her hair. "But you should know by now that I do not rush."

He kissed her again. She clutched to him, hungry. She was like eating fruit, or sitting naked in the cold, night grass. So real it cuts your face, makes your teeth tingle and sting, holds you to the earth, ferocious. It was not like magic. Magic was a reality all its own. But it anchored him to nothing but the Fade. And he knew the Fade. He had seen and felt all there was of that gone and whispering place, and while its endless changing shapes and prisms still had their ways of seduction and comfort, none of it was like this. In these moments, he no longer wanted the Fade. It was like a sharp, foreign object in his mouth. Sene made him feel like a man, feet on the hard soil. With Sene, he wanted to use his hands. They were his most prized instruments, and they always had been.

She was as real and red as sunburn. As the huge curly hair that tickled his nose when he put his mouth to her neck, where it smelled of sweat and root and rain and flower.

She sort of shivered against him.

Now, one hand, he set his palm across her stomach. The other, he used to get her out of the cotton slacks. She lifted her hips to guide him. He felt his own breath leave his body, and then she sat up, instinctual, and yanked him out of his shirt. Her breath, shaking now, she said his name.

“Yes?" he said, studying her and how she sat there before him, self-conscious, but in a way that was natural to her and to moments like these. But it would not be forever, and there would come a time, they both knew, when she would no longer be embarrassed to look and feel this way. It all just felt like another layer of their friendship, coming free.

“Is this real?” she said, genuinely curious as she put her ear to his chest. He could sense her, listening to his heartbeat, claiming it for her own. "Are we in the Fade?"

“No, Sene," he said. "I will only ever take you to the Fade if you ask me to.”

"I see," she said, and then she looked up at him, and lowered herself to the bed where she breathed and became used to her own nakedness. She lifted her knees off the bed, smiled, and reached for his hands.

But he just smiled. He set her hands to the side, and he sat back on his knees, and he traced his knuckles to the inside of her bare thigh. "Can I?" he said.

"Yes, you can," she said.

So, he touched her, the soft and the wet. She made small gasp, as a knife, It emitted from her throat as he entered her. Only just. Drawing her out and into the moment. She closed her eyes, and she was full of motion. He held her arched hips flat, gentle but firm, as she writhed there. Small moans as he went deeper. Quiet, wet. Slowly, she settled. “Would you like to go to the Fade, vhenan?” he said—working her slowly, watching, feeling the need building inside of him as well, but he had found the courage for patience that night. Somehow. He knew it would not last forever.

"No," she said.

“Good," he said. "I like Skyhold."

"Me, too," she breathed.

With this, she reached for him. He lowered himself so that she could kiss him, once. He used the opportunity to build and to open her further, gather only a small bit of speed. She had one hand on his face until he rose out of reach, as he drew out the wet, made her soft, put her past the edge, unstuck and beautiful. Her legs splayed, she had lost all inhibition, her self-consciousness gone. She invited him. He put his mouth to her ear as he finished her. He wanted to be right next to her, right up close to the noises she made as she let go.

Her moans lit the room and filled the ancient halls of Skyhold. He smiled, his own breath ragged, and he wondered if anyone else could hear her. He did not think so. These old walls were thick. Though the idea enticed him. He wasn’t sure why. The thought of them here, together, as others listened through the stone of the walls…that was a new feeling. It was strong. They were so high up, way up here in the heavens. Away from everything—the Inquisition, the advisors who no doubt slept as he unlocked her beneath the light of the Frostbacks. He felt her grasping, eased her through to the end, and then slowly, he withdrew and sat back on his heels, waited. Allowed. She peaked up at him through her fingers. 

He steadied one hand on each of her knees after that, her legs wide and wobbling against them, as she came down, her eyes closed once again. For a moment, it was like he wasn’t there at all. Some part of her had lifted up and gone away on her own. That was like the secret of Sene. She could be his, and she could be free all at once. How did she do it? He watched her, intensely, trying to figure it out.

But all at once then, she opened her eyes as planets, her pink mouth parted. She had hair in her face. He pushed it to the side for her, touched the tip of her ear, discovered it there, new.

“Come, vhenan,” he said, and he pulled her into a sit, across from him. She did not speak. He didn’t move, just waited to see what she would do.

It took a moment. But then she reached for him. She removed the jaw, steadily, as if practiced, and set it in a pile on the bedside table. He put his hand on her chest, in the dip, on the breastbone to feel her heartbeat. It was hard and safe and whole. Fascinated, she reached for him—just below the waist. He took her wrist. She softened, went limp but still curious as he guided her to her back once more. He moved between her legs, and then, he let her explore. She found his waistband, the drawstring, loosened and pushed it away. He crawled from his pant legs, one at a time, always looking her in the eyes as she felt him. He made a deep and primal sound at the squeeze and tug of her hand. She was not anxious, but her breath was shaking, and with nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to hide any longer, she did not look away from him awkwardly this time. She stared back, as intensely as he did. He kissed her, soft.

“ _Ara avise'ain_ ,” he whispered, his lips touching her right cheekbone. “Are you ready?”

“Yes,” she breathed, with a familiar resolve. Like a window, she had always been wide open to him. All he had to do was go to her. It was a hard truth. And now, he knew. 

All it took was one swell, one gentle thrust. They looked at each other, like it was the end of world and the end of time and all the stars gone dark. He was inside her now, a state of being that he could not have fully prepared for, and it flexed him out of his shell and made him feel alive.

He went easy at first, but she brought her hands to his face as she arched her back, lifting them both from the bed, and they looked at each other, and it was a whole lot of good things at once. Their foreheads touched. Then, her unseen strength as she clenched him. He cradled her, his patience, his control, all of it a thing of a former moment now, and everything he had, he put into her that night. He very quickly lost himself, becoming reckless, fast, like her, and then he put his face into her neck. All these little deaths, passing through her and into him together. But he just wanted her.

She wanted on top now. He let her, easily. Arms folded around his neck, she pulled until he held her in his lap, both of them sitting, eyes locked. Gray, green. As she went, she gained confidence, began to trust herself, to find a speed and a rhythm. This put him over, the ability to let go, just for the inside flash of a moment, as she took control. She would hold still, tease him. He found himself on his back as she pushed upward, and she looked up, up at the ceiling. He saw the hollow of her chin and neck, a strange place to live. How he wanted to live there. But soon, she was back with her mouth on his again, then on his ear, then his cheekbone, his eyes. She was losing control. Sensing this, he took it back, like he was wont to do, flipped them over, and pushed her knees into her chest, an instinct to bring himself deeper. Her eyes wide, but then she closed them, moaned, his name on her tongue, in the air between them. He felt his own eyes roll back into his head, clutching her arched hips, driving harder, reading her every breath, her every reaction to measure that it was not too much, and then her sounds unfolded, grew severe. He felt her, churning, the wet and the spill of it, sending him over the edge. He sped up, faster until the end. As he came, he let go, buried his face into her neck, pulsed, released, living there for just a moment, until the tide lowered, and the waves ceased, and he was overcome with such clarity, such purity of mind, he thought that if he opened his eyes, he would be able to see the future.

But it was not the future. Not yet. She was tense beneath him, shivering, then limp. Surfacing quickly, he rolled over, pulled her on top of him right away, still inside of her. This was important. He wanted to see her from this angle now, and to give her power in this moment of utter newness and the strange after-terror. Even if it was not fear, he knew her, and in those first moments after it was done, she would blush, self-conscious, worried, embarrassed, afraid she had done something wrong. But if she was above him—if she could look down on him now, she would see him and all of his nakedness, too, and she would not feel so vulnerable or alone.

Still coming back to full consciousness, she buried her face into his chest, clutched to him like a small animal, like she was afraid he would disappear.

“Vhenan,” he said, finally, to break the silence.

She sat up quickly to the sound of his voice. She looked around, covered her bare chest instinctively with her long arms. “Is this real?” she said.

This made him laugh. Such a creature, here, on top of him. So unexpected. He reached up, tucked a red ringlet behind her ear. She was so mild and so beautiful. The Arlathan sky of ancient days come and gone. But she was not a ruin or a tomb. She was not a city or a goddess. She was new. Their sounds, he could still hear them, just as he'd thought, imprinting the Skyhold masonry. Etchings there in the stone. Whatever happened between them, he could come back here as long as the fortress stood, touch the walls, relive Sene and all of her glory and freckles and the red pieces of her hair. Both a wonder and a sin. A comfort and a despair. He chose not to think of it, because he had fallen in love with her. And because he had a choice. She had shown him that.

“It’s real, Sene,” he said. “ _Ar dirtha’var’en. Avise'ain_.”

She smiled. Gently now, sensing that she was comfortable, he removed her, set her beside him on the bed and sat up to meet her eye to eye. But this time, he looked upon her delicately, not probing. Just with care. He held her small hands inside of his own, gathered them all together in a bundle to his chest. Touching foreheads. He closed his eyes. “Next time,” he said. “Wear your hair up, in your braids. All wrapped around your head as you do in battle.”

“What?” she said, not expecting humor, he supposed.

“I want to take them apart myself,” he said, taking a strand of her hair between his fingers, now looking her in the eye. “One by one. Will you let me be the one to free it for you? Your hair."

“Sure,” she said, smiling, entertained by the notion, and she melted into him, her cheek resting on his shoulder. “Next time,” she said.

“Next time.”

He looked around now. How much time had passed? The night was still dark, but unless he went to look at the stars, there was no way to know. “We should sleep, vhenan,” he said. “Tomorrow morning, we ride for the Hissing Wastes. It will be a very long trip.”

“Fine,” she said. “I just—let me just—” She quickly gathered a sheet around herself, stood from the bed. Pushing little tangled balls of red hair out of her face, she smiled at him. “I have to pee. I'll be right back."

“Take your time,” he said. “I’ll be here.”

 

In the washroom, she went pee, and then she found a mirror. She sat on a stone bench and looked at herself, the pale, green vallaslin arching across her cheekbones, and the freckles. The only thing truly new was the flush in her cheeks, and she smiled, laughed, covering her mouth in embarrassment as if someone might see or hear her self-satisfaction. She did not wash herself that night. She left it there, all of him. She would ride to the Hissing Wastes in the morning still smelling of their sex, knowing everything while no one else did. She wondered if they would notice, her friends, like Sera and Cole and Dorian, if they’d sense the change in her, in the two of them. Together.

That night, she dreamed she went to a fountain. It was green and tall and and full of coins. A white wolf came to her with a live fox in its mouth, and it looked at her with pale, sweet eyes. She asked where it was from, but the wolf only watched her. She asked if it would eat that fox, and it dropped the fox at her feet, and the fox ran away. She pet the wolf once. Then, she woke up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Full Elvhen Translations, plus my methodology for much of Book I, can be found [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7477965/chapters/16994808).
> 
> Elven translations:
> 
> “Isalan ma gara suin em.” - "Make love to me."
> 
> "Avise'ain." - term of endearment, means "Little flame."
> 
> "Felas, vhenan." - "Slow down, my heart." 
> 
> "Harthan, Solas." - "I'm listening, Solas."
> 
> “Ar dirtha’var’en. Avise'ain.” - "I promise. Little flame."


	2. Stripped

She was uneasy, that night under the stars. The weather was warm and dry, so the linen of their tent was thin. You could see the light from the moon coming in like a great, wide mouth, wanting to suck them both up, put them back where they came from. The stars were dreadfully far away up there, but then again, this was the Hissing Wastes, and so was everything.

“Wasn't it kind of weird when you called Varric _Child of the Stone_ the other day?" she said, biting off a hangnail.

“Excuse me?”

“When we helped Cole with that fucking Templar. I just—is that offensive?”

Solas smirked. He'd been reading a book by the light of a single candle. “No, vhenan. It was old fashioned. Varric calls me Chuckles. He also calls me grandpa, though I imagine he's several years older than me. I was just playing the part.”

“It just seemed…weird. And how old are you anyway?”

“We’re in the Hissing Wastes, a hellscape as cold as ice. Tevinter supremacists roam the area, desiring your red and shiny head on a platter, and this is what you choose to worry about? My weird, old speech?”

“You think my head is shiny?” she said.

“Yes, I do.”

She touched her hair, sniffed it. "You didn't answer my question."

“What are you doing?” he said. "Sit down."

He set the book away, chewing on a piece of bark he'd found outside. She plopped down right in front of him, sat cross-legged. He grabbed her face and pushed her cheeks into a smile. “What's the matter?”

“I feel bad about Dorian,” she said.

“Dorian?"

“That whole thing with his father—it’s really messing me up. I shouldn't have said anything. I should have just let it unravel. That guy is an asshole.”

“What his father did— _tried_ to do—is unforgivable. To change a man’s soul, it scares me, too, vhenan. It’s base and sadly corrupt. And I know you and Dorian are close.”

“I think we are,” she said. "I've already been through a lot of shit with him. I've been through more shit with Dorian, and you, and Sera and everybody else in the past three months than I have in my whole life. What the fuck?"

“Perhaps you should send for him,” he said.

"Send for who?"

“Dorian. A good fight could offer him some satisfaction. Especially against Venatori.”

“Do you think so?” she said.

“Seems more productive than sitting in the Herald’s Rest, getting shit-faced,” said Solas.

She looked at him. Chewing. He smirked.

“I guess,” she said.

“You’re a good friend, vhenan.”

"Thanks."

He took her hand, traced his thumb over her knuckles.

"Solas?" she said.

"Yes?"

“Show me something. I'm not tired."

He looked at her and sighed. She had her hair down, and she smelled of wet soil and…wet. They’d not been away from each other since making camp. Blackwall left well enough alone, even kicked off to hunt some after dinner. A stern man, but observant, courteous. Cole, though, was curious. He kept spying on them. He had many questions. They’d seen his shadow lurking outside the tent. In any case, she—Sene—had such a mildness about her that night. Above all nights. Like drawing shapes in the sand. Foam on the sea. She was tired and sexed, flushed and renewed. “One thing," he said.

She smiled, enthusiastic. He liked that she could become this, how fast she was. Like a whip. “Shall we stay or go outside?” she said.

“We’ll stay here,” he said. He told her to hold out her hands into a cradle. She obeyed.

“What are you going to do?” she said.

“Patience,” he said.

He put his hands above hers. They glowed, a quiet green energy. He watched her eyes grow with curiosity. Then, he pulled his hands back, and there, set in her palms, was a feather—deep red and rich green—shimmering.

“A feather?” she said.

“Patience, vhenan. Remember?”

The feather shivered a little. Then it began to glow. It grew and multiplied. Little things began happening and shifting inside it. The pale green energy filled the tent, like a strange smoke. Soon, the feather withered and then puffed up all at once. It breathed and plucked and stomped and cooed.

“It’s a bird,” said Sene. “You made a bird.” She beamed into it, petted its feral back. It looked up at her with odd, green eyes. “It’s eyes are…my eyes.”

“It’s all the colors from the tent,” said Solas. She looked around. “I just put them together, made their energies collaborate into becoming a bird.”

"You made them collaborate, huh?"

"Yes, I did."

It impressed her. “Is it real?” she said.

He smiled. “Always that question with you, Sene. Is it real? Well, what do you mean? Is it real in the sense that it sits in your hand, poking your skin with its talons? Then yes, it is real.”

“Okay,” said Sene, holding it up close to her face to examine the plumage. It rustled up against her cheek. “Then, does it live?”

Solas leaned close to her. “That is the far better question," he said. "And the answer is no.” He held his hand out over the bird, which began to glow again. “It is just energy, vhenan. It has no purpose, no life, no soul.” With that, he waved his hand over the bird, and it dissipated into the air, squawking as it went.

“Birds!” they heard Cole from outside the tent now. “Ghost birds?”

They laughed. “That was pretty,” said Sene. “ _Enaste,_ Solas."

He held her, put his face into her hair. "Sleep," he said.

“I just have to go send for Dorian,” she said. “I’ll be right back.” She kissed the bridge of his nose, got up with the pelt wrapped around her shoulders, and smiled as she left through the curtain.

Solas opened his book again, but then Cole came inside and sat down on the ground across from him. “Cole,” said Solas, glancing up. "How can I help you?"

“Your chewing things again,” said Cole. “I heard a bird.”

Solas raised his eyebrows. “I apologize,” said Solas. “I was showing Sene some magic.”

Cole stared at him then, intently. Solas could feel him peeling through the layers of his mind. “You…love the Inquisitor," he said. "You care for her more than you do yourself. You would like to braid her hair, but you're not sure you remember how. It has been a long time.”

Solas smiled, closed the book once more. Cole smelled like fire and sky and apples. “Yes, I do," he said.

“It is new,” said Cole. “You walk in the sunlight, but the ocean scares you. Why?”

“I'll have to meditate on that one, Cole. Your metaphors can be rather vague."

“I am sorry, Solas," he said.

"Do not apologize."

"The speckles on her skin remind you of the sky from your youth, and so you go to them in your dreams. Awake, you pick them apart with your eyes and you hold them against your skin like cool water. The speckles—what are they?”

“They’re just freckles.”

"Right,” he said. “If you could swim in them, you would."

“Probably,” said Solas.

Cole looked at him. Solas smirked. “I’m glad that you love her, Solas,” said Cole. “It makes the world glad, too. It’s…smiling!”

Then, Sene came back inside the tent.

“Cole,” she said. “Did we wake you up?”

“You see him. Your heart is naked. It _is_ real.”

She blushed and started to laugh. "My heart is naked?"

“Goodnight, Cole,” said Solas.

Cole nodded and got up to leave. On his way, he touched Sene's arm. He whispered to her so that Solas could not hear. “You fear that he will leave.”

“What?”

“But it is you,” said Cole. He leaned in closer. “One day. If he loses you, you will have to find him again, but it works both ways.”

He left the tent. Sene glanced over at Solas, but Solas was leaning back on his palms and staring up at the ceiling. He had not been paying attention.

"It will probably take Dorian several days to get here," she said.

He opened his eyes. "I don't mind it here," said Solas. "It feels familiar, in a way."

"Familiar?" said Sene. She got down in bedroll beside him, put her head on his shoulder. He snapped his fingers once, conjured a butterfly from thin air. It flitted up to the corner if the tent, a little piece of fire. Light and warmth. Sene watched it, the tired in her eyes like glass. She was close to sleep. "Familiar how?"

He tossed the book, pushed the hair off her cheeks. They lie down to face each other by the light of the butterfly. His mind felt soft all of a sudden. Like if he just kept pressing he'd sink deeper and deeper forever, and never find the bottom. "I'm not sure," he said. "It's just a feeling, vhenan."

She kissed him, deep, trusted him. It took him by surprise. But it was the kind of kiss with an ending, as she had only wanted to close the space between them for a little while. When their lips parted, she felt the air go out of him, and he smoothed his big, dry hand up her shirt, and he held her, in earnest. He was a big man and terribly elegant, but she had a way of undoing him. Somehow. She always had, ever since Haven where they used to hang out on rooftops while it snowed and he would do little magic tricks, like making it snow and fashioning a flower from behind her ear, and together, they would watch the Breach. Swirling, sucking. His hands were big and rough on the surface, and they understood her, and she was not entirely sure how or why that was, and she'd never known a mage to have hands like that, but she didn't care. She'd never known a man like Solas. In truth, Sene had never really known a _man_. She wondered if this was what it was like for everyone. Every person in the world who had known a man, really known a man, or if she had gotten lucky somehow. If their stripped, feral love was as rare as it felt.

The butterfly dimmed. They curled into one another and slept as animals.

Sene liked Solas’s mind, because she could play inside of it, like a sandbox. She liked the tools and the sparkling pebbles it offered her. She liked magic and hearing stories about the Fade, and she liked his body, his chest like a plank, and she liked his hands. She was real, and he was real, and their sex was real. Love was just a metaphor for things that were real. Solas had come to her walking on water, but now, they swam the tides together. She was romantic. She was green like that. Fluffy, wanting to believe and to see the best in people. But she was also red. She seemed simple, but she had many hidden depths and fears and formulas beneath her surface. She was a storm, and the sun. She took big bites out of love, because that was the only way she knew how, just following her instincts. Sene.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Elvhen Translations:
> 
> "Enaste." - Thank you.


	3. Tell Me Something I Don't Know

She loved magic. She had none, and she had met very few mages in her lifetime, but she was enchanted by the raw power and by the light show of Solas. He would show her, for fun. By the creeks of Crestwood and the Hinterlands, in the coldest nights at the Hissing Wastes. They would huddle to the corner of his tent, folded into complicated shapes, his hands around hers—conjuring fire, ice, birds, and storms. She held it in her hand, whatever it was he gave her—he’d rig it so she could feel the magic in her skin. She needed more than seeing. She needed to touch, to feel in order to be convinced of her reality. In the Wastes, with Cole and Dorian asleep on the other side of the fire, they shattered civilizations, conjured spirits and vanquished entire empires with their bodies alone. _We are not in the Fade_ , he whispered, his hands in her hair as he felt her insides. _You must keep quiet, vhenan._ In the morning, standing on the sands at sunrise, drinking coffee brought in by Scout Harding’s men, Dorian gave him a knowing look, clapped him on the shoulder—rather hard. The two men stood, shoulder to shoulder, the steam rising from Solas’s mug, clouding the skies between them.

“Don’t break her, my friend,” Dorian said, dark-eyed, a half-smile. But knowing. The Tevinter, always with the doublespeak. But he was wise. He saw more than he let on.

Tents in the wild—these were heady distractions. Strange and fantasy, feeling around for each other’s edges in the dark. Like in the Exalted Plains, when they wandered away from camp and over a hill one night, into the river, where they found themselves half-naked, huddled together beneath a single gray quilt of Antivan wool, staring into a waterfall made white from the moon. At the top of the waterfall was a great, stone statue of the Dread Wolf.

She looked up at it with her strange, green eyes. Lacking all suspicion. Curious, intent. He put his arm around her. He felt a terrible tugging somewhere deep in his chest, like a hook. “What are you thinking, Sene?"

“I don’t know,” she said. "What do you mean?"

"Are you thinking like a Dalish woman?"

"Excuse me."

He looked at her. He smirked. "Tell me about your clan," he said. "Who they are. What are they like? I want to know."

“My clan is not terribly religious," she said, smudging a bit of dirt from her wrist.

"Seriously?" he said.

"They'd like to think they are, but they're not. We are not migratory. I grew up on a grain farm, Solas. For as much as we claim to hate humans, we certainly do a lot of trade with them in the cities. We don't hate humans at all. We have a statue, just like this one, in the woods not far from my family's camp on our compound. People leave offerings, whatever. But I only used it to measure direction. I don't give any shits about the Dread Wolf."

“Direction?" said Solas.

"It faces north. It's like a perfect compass."

"I'd like to see that," he said. "You telling north from south in the woods."

"They're boring stories," she said. "And lonely. I assure you." She pressed her body into his then, hard. It came on so quickly with her. How her body knew how to take care of itself. Skin stretched tight over muscle and bone. She was strong, and she was tall. This was unusual, and it had a way of messing his head, making him needful and grateful all at once. They stood in the water halfway to their knees.

“I understand loneliness," he said. He put his arms around her instinctively. “Are you that cold?"

“Yes,” she said, breathing out. “Let's go back to the tent."

“As you wish.”

They kissed.

In the tent after that, he traced her body, every inch, with his fingers, his eyes, his mouth. She watched him and waited. She had learned patience, an appreciation for time. She no longer rushed him. When it was done, they clutched each other until first light, drying beneath the warmth of a wolf pelt. But this was in the wild, as clawing animals and exotic painted beings from the past. Infused by the magical energies of _elsewhere_.

 

Skyhold was where their love became. Where it lived and grew. Though some had begun to suspect the truth, they did tend to keep themselves in earnest secret, if only because it made things easier. In her quarters, the night before they left for Halamshiral, he showed her how to grow a flower from the stone. She poured herself deep after that, released all inhibition. He explored her in new ways that felt desperate and primal, and he let her explore him—with her mouth and her hands. She was fascinated by the things she could do to him, what she could draw from deep inside of him, the new noises and the ancient language she did not understand but loved anyway. She made him feel pain, pressure, heat. By the end of the night, he had taken her from so many depths and angles that the two lie useless on the mat by the fire. Once they surfaced, she wrapped herself in a sheet and went for snacks. She brought a tin of cookies from a chest by the foot of the bed.

“Cookies?” he said. He had pulled on a pair of pants and sat with his elbows resting on his knees. “Did you bake these yourself, vhenan?"

“With Sera,” she said.

“Ah. So, flavored with the blood of nobles, I assume? Or, human feet perhaps. Nothing too _elfy_. No herbs or moonlight.”

She shoved him in the shoulder. He ate the cookie.

“Good, huh?” she said.

“Quite,” he said.

“We used rose petals with the sugar.”

He smirked. “That is very old-fashioned," he said. "My mother used to use rose petals with her sugar."

"Your mother?"

"Yes," he said. "It's interesting. Sera doing anything old fashioned is interesting. I think she may dislike me."

“She likes you fine,” she said. “She just doesn’t get you.”

Solas sighed. "Then she must hate me," he said. "Sera hates all that she does not get, or so I'm led to believe."

“It’s not true,” said Sene. “You just don’t know her well enough yet. She and I find plenty of common ground. For example, we both hate peas and love cookies.”

His slung his arm around her shoulders then, tugged her into him so that she put her head on his shoulder. His heart had a habit of filling quite easily those days. In all honesty, he'd always been like this. He'd just never had a place to empty it before. Her hair was big and red. She’d brought them cookies. “I’m glad, vhenan,” he said. “Sera is your friend.”

“Thank you,” she said. "You’re a good man, Solas.” She was upright about it. It was formal for her, like she’d been rehearsing, or wanting to say it for a while.

He was just looking at her, over his shoulder. Knowing. He bit into another cookie.

She went on. “I know you don’t think you fit in with...elves. You don’t have a _faction_. Or whatever. But I don’t either. Not really. Not anymore. And neither does Sera. Maybe we can be our own weird little faction?”

"What about the Inquisition," he said.

"There's that, too," she said.

Together, then, they sat watching the fire for a little while. He'd put a bit of magic into it, just to make it pretty. Fireflies and things like that, so that it sort of crackled in many colors around the edges. At some point, he looked at her, brushed his thumb across each of her cheekbones, memorizing the pale vallaslin.  "Are you ready, Sene?" he said. "For the Winter Palace?"

"No," she said.

He took her hand, turned it over, and began to draw shapes into her palm—a radish, a star, a kite. "Can I help?" he said.

"Tell me something I don't know," she said. "Something about me."

"Something about you." He sighed. Though he knew it seemed like an odd question, the answer was also extraordinarily easy. For all of her strength and speed and intensity, Sene did not trust herself. He closed her hand into a fist, and he planted his own around it. After a moment, he released, and the anchor glowed, humming and green, only just. At first, this startled her. She did not like to think of it, the anchor, outside those moments in the wild when it became of grave necessity. But she was brave. She did not flinch or try to pull away.  "You are a part of a legacy," he said. "Sene."

"A legacy?"

He nodded, tucked a piece of hair behind her ear, and then he held her hand once more, to let the magic course through them both at slow, strong intervals. "This is not about Corypheus or the anchor. It is not about providence. It is about you. Your choices. People here tend to rely on you too much, I'll give you that. And I'm sure you feel about as young as you are, perhaps even younger. But whatever you do, just do not lose sight of your vision, for how people should treat one another, for the kinds of lives they deserve. As we progress, Inquisitor, mind and body and heart, time will take its toll. But you can win. You are, in fact, very good at winning, Sene."

At this point, he let go of her hand, and the slow, green humming of the anchor went quiet. She was not blushing. She was very serious. She looked up at him and kissed the bridge of his nose, and then she held him by the ear.

“ _Enaste_ , Solas,” she said, softly, and pressed a finger to his chin.

“ _Ara Enaste, vhenan_ ,” he said. “ _Avise'ain_. Now. More cookies, if you please.”

She smiled, gave him another of her star-shaped cookies. Then another. More. The crumbs went everywhere. All over the ground, in his lap. There were crumbs in her hair. These little remnants. He’d not had cookies in such a long time, and never with a girl like this.

 

That night, Sene awoke with a start. Something haunted her—a vague nightmare, just lurking around the edges. Shapeless. She could not remember. It had been only a feeling, like running full speed and then tripping into quicksand, and no one there to pull her back up. She watched Solas sleep next to her on the bed, listened to his breathing, slow and even. He slept hard, and he slept late. She had noticed this about him. She often awoke before him in the mornings, and he was always very slow to start the day. She touched his face with a soft hand. Sometimes, while they slept, he found her in the Fade, in her dreams. He showed her things, like ballrooms and elven ruins floating up in the sky, huge castles in the clouds, and great, ancient trees with gnarled faces and magical dispositions. But not tonight, it seemed. She did not think she would see him again until morning, not outside of her own simple dreams at least. This did not sadden her now, but it did leave her uneasy. Where did he retreat to, alone, these nights far away from waking life? It kept her awake to think of it. It was a secret place, and no matter how she tried, and no matter how easily he could find her, she could never find him in dreams. She could feel him sometimes, vibrating in her fingertips, the ends of her hair. Just a darkened edge on the very horizon of her mind. But she still somehow knew that when this happened, it was because he wanted it. He was sort of a master of dreaming, in this way.

Sene got up from the bed and lit a candle. She went past the fire, the bearskin and the cookie crumbs, out to the balcony to stand in the purity of darkness. Away from him now, cleansed by moonlight and the mountain air so cold it cleansed her insides, she realized, that she was, in some way, frightened. Not by Solas himself, but by his distance. That any time, in dreaming, he could be so far away from her, and yet, know exactly where she was, and how she searched for him, and then use that knowledge to push her away. It was an enormous power. Not just magic but intensely elven, weird, and she just felt like it was very old. But her senses for these kinds of things were spontaneous, and they did not last long. Sene was an archer, and her clan was such an odd clan, they did not even have a mage who lived with them. They never used magic, ever. And so Solas's power, his mystery, it drew her, but the feeling it could create overwhelmed her. Like drowning in an endless sea, but still, she welcomed it, for as long as she was unaware of its consequences, they did not exist. That was the beauty of Sene.

So she blew out the candle, and she went back inside, and she crawled into bed with Solas. This man. A man in a bed beside her. It was so strange to be here, in this place where everything was new and bodies and somehow so  _adult_ and yet, the two of them were so much like children. Putting fireflies into the fire and eating cookies on the bedroom floor. Which was the right way? She had no idea. So she just pressed around him, and pressed, and pressed and pressed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Elven Translations:
> 
> "Enaste, Solas." - "Thank you, Solas." (Literally translates to "Grace." or "Blessing.")
> 
> "Ara enaste, vhenan." - "You're welcome, vhenan." (Literally translates to "My grace." or "My blessing." ie: "It is my blessing.")


	4. Hello, vhenan.

When she awoke the next morning, he was already out of bed, standing by the window. He had his back to her, bare, comfortable, long, triangular. He had big shoulders, and she liked this about him. Sene was tall, but he could made her feel small, possessed. It was unusual. he was reading what looked like an elaborate note written on a piece of fine parchment. He’d stoked the fire, she could tell, as the room was warm. She picked her cotton nightshirt off the floor, pulled it over her head, then she found his pendant, the wolf jaw, in a pile on the bedside table. She wrapped it up in her hand and, before she went, buried her face in his pillow one more time. His smell and how it clung to the linens—the entire bed, the entire room. She hadn’t known this of men, that it didn’t matter that these were her quarters—her smell had been overtaken quickly, and everything smelled like him now: heady, thick, a man’s smell. She would not let the servant girl wash the sheets or the pillow cases, though she knew she’d probably have to soon. His smell made things feel permanent in a way that made her stomach hurt. _There is too much time,_ she said to herself, and while she knew it sounded backwards, what she meant was that time leads to uncertainty. As long as it continues to pass, there will be change, and she did not want change. Not just yet.

She went past the desk and stood beside him. He seemed to sense her coming and opened up an arm for her, a small avenue to his embrace, established and so oddly practiced and without prompt or complication. She could not help herself. There were times when she wondered what they were— _really_ were. Comfortable and soft and quietly domestic, like this, but then wet, and magic, and animals, becoming agitated by the presence of touch and smell. Desire pushed in like storm clouds, making everything fast. Yet all of it was so intensely private. She’d told no one, and neither had he. She knew it was no secret that the two held a strange and desperate attachment to one another. This was impossible to hide. They too easily paired off, disappeared while in the wild. After a fight, the first thing they always did was find each other, exchange a small but serious gesture: _both okay, it’s okay._ And while in Skyhold the sheer amount of time they spent alone in her quarters, or more publicly in the atrium. Even when they weren’t touching, they were together so often, and they always had been. Ever since Haven. People noticed these things. The Inquisition wasn’t blind. Still, when it came to talking, her title as Inquisitor bought them a lot of space. Most were afraid, or too courteous, to ask. The prospect of others whispering about them excited her, though instinctively, she knew it didn’t matter, that formalities and titles and definitions were Josephine’s territory. If, at some point, politics required that the Inquisitor title her attachment to Solas, then so be it. But even still, there were times she felt that she could not process all that had happened between them, or the fact that it all felt a fast and reckless dream, and she itched to…talk with someone about it. About him.

“How did you sleep?” he said, kissing her once on the eye.

“Bad dreams,” she said, pressing her cheek into his chest. “Quick sand. Why is that?”

“I'm not sure,” he said. "Quicksand could mean anything." He sounded preoccupied this morning. She knew that it was because of Halamshiral, and everyone was going to be preoccupied that day, and it bothered her. She did not want to think of it that way. It made her more annoyed than she already was, in her stupid bird’s heart. “Our final instructions,” he said, handing her the piece of parchment. “The ball is a masquerade, apparently.”

“Masks?” she said.

“We won’t be wearing masks, vhenan. I don't think.”

“Fine,” she set the parchment on the desk beside them. "I guess you'll know what to do."

“Will I?” he said. Then he looked down at her. He held her chin. Seeming to sense her anxiety, he smiled, lighthearted. “Have confidence, vhenan. You may be Dalish, but you are still winning. You are the Inquisitor. _Sar ena’sal’inen sulen sul’ga’lan hartha_.” He smiled.

“I know,” she said. “But I’m not looking forward to how they’re going to look at me. Like I'm some sort of elf."

“You are some sort of elf. They’ll be looking at me the same way. Sera, too.”

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “I don't want to go, but I feel okay.”

“You’ve been spending a lot of time with Josephine.”

“She’s a good teacher. Intense about these things, but at least that means she’s thorough.”

“Indeed.”

In that room, the world was warm and only hearthfire and Frostbacks, the falling snow, sex and food and books and all their generous conversation. Sene sighed, because in the Winter Palace, great big blue thing of sadness, everything would be foreign and glass, fake, cold, made of silk brocade and velveteen. Stupid scratchy fabrics she refused to wear. She’d never been to a castle. She’d never seen a ball, or a masquerade. She knew it would be pretty, and she knew it would be chaos. She was a little bit interested in chaos, if only because it was unpredictable, and unpredictability was when Sene was at her best. Planning made her itchy. She couldn't bear it. 

She looked up at him. He was looking out the window now, to the mountains. Or somewhere past. Stern, strong. She felt a familiar distance growing between them, as it always did in times like these. It was utilitarian, and though she did not like it, wholly necessary. It happened every time they were about to enter a serious situation of unknown circumstance—battle, negotiations, when they vacated their purity as lovers for the purposes of survival, becoming leaders of the Inquisition again, and their bond was not cast aside, but just one layer of the complex, tangled cause that had driven them together in the first place.

She picked up his hand, placed the jaw inside. It was meant as a sort of goodbye, for now. She thought that the moment she did this, he would kiss her head, put on his shirt, call her vhenan, and leave. _I’ll see you at the gate, vhenan,_ he’d say. It is how they operated. But this time, it was different. Once the pendant touched his hand, he looked down at it, then at her, changed somehow, and instead of leaving, he stayed. He kept her there, his hand on hers, now studying her bones, the way they poked through her skin, the freckles, and as she watched him, she could sense as he began to move within her. It caught her off guard. His intensity, it had the habit of changing and dividing her. Like on rooftops in Haven when she would ask him to make in snow, and instead, he would just stare at her and smirk. She lost her bearings, swimming in the gray lights, and then she was caught beneath the pillar of his focus. It pinned her to the earth, crushed her out of nowhere, held her together, inhabited her. 

He folded his hand over the top of hers, enclosing the jaw between them. Then he pushed the red hair out of her face, playing at the edges of her skin. He studied the outline of her ear, the place where her hair met her forehead, the bridge of her nose, the outline of her mouth and her cheekbones, staring and tracing with the soft part of his thumb, his other hand still holding hers and the jaw as if to bind her. At this point, she felt lost, confused by how much she wanted him, and how quickly the mood between them could become this. No mercy. She got closer, pressed herself to him. Like rain, the dull hammering inside. She ached. He traced his hand down, encircling her hip bones, touching her, and this made him smile, but only just. When his focus returned, he was serious again. Fixated. He traced her mouth with his fingers so that she could taste herself.

She thought it must not be real anymore. She thought they must be sleeping now. She always thought this way when it got too deep.

“Are we in the Fade?” she breathed, closing her eyes to his touch. She knew the question bothered him, but she couldn’t help it. She opened her eyes now, but she could not steal his gaze from where it fixed at her skin, the freckles on her neck. He lifted her chin to study them further.

“No, vhenan,” he said.

“Solas, I—”

“ _Dirthas vi’dirth’el’vhenan, melahn ar’an ele palal,_ ” he said. _“El’vhen, avise'ain._ ”

“ _Eolasan_ , Solas.”

“ _Vianas mar’vhenan sul’em_.”

“Solas,” she said, her hand still inside of his, pressing to the jaw, his grip stronger now. She couldn’t seem to stop saying his name. He pressed his other hand on the small of her back now, a careful, close embrace. He put his forehead to hers. She shivered. “ _I’tel’ma, sildearan aron adahl i’tel’gen’adahl_ ," she said. " _Ma’dun isal ma, aron arlater isalen vunlea. Sildearan bellanaris or’ma’vhenan_.”

“ _Ar my garem_ ,” he said. They stood there, still, for a moment, as two trees groping for sunlight. It was terrible and everything.

Then, he pinned her hand above her head, pressed her body firmly into the wall beside the window where they stood, a muffled thud. With his other hand, he pushed up the fabric around her waist. She felt him, finally, catching the wet in his hand, drawing out more with a finger, tracing along her quiet slit. The need, the pleasure building in her, she whimpered. He was silent as he touched her, patient, with his mouth at her ear, but he was holding back. He would not let her finish. She could feel his breath, steady and hot, as he held her there instead, almost in worship. Then, in a single motion it seemed, he picked her up, placed her on the desk, and then he was inside of her, filling her, and she was there on top of her books and these strange, weird surfaces. Crumpling. Dry paper, getting wetter beneath her. It was new. She hung off the edge, wrapped her legs around his waist for balance, her hand and his hand, the jaw of the wolf, pinned to the desk above her head. His breathing grew faster. He went deeper. She lost control, arching, finding herself, coming quickly, the ecstasy like sunrise. And in her mind, she pictured silver birds.

She heard him then, small moans to her ear. Like he was trying to form words but could not. They were the sounds of words, but they were fragments, incomplete. This was a rare thing for Solas—speechlessness—and so soon. It was going fast this time, really fast, and this made him vulnerable to her. Solas was always in careful control, drawing out each experience to its absolute limit. Everything took forever with him. He _took his time_ , as if he had more time than anyone, as if he knew something about time that she did not. But she felt him then. He was already close, so she clutched to his neck and told him to just do it. Her speed, sometimes. It could make things hurt.

He lost his grip on her then, freed the arm he’d had pinned over her head and put both of his hands inside her hair. He locked her in a deep kiss. As he went faster, harder, the desk was loud. It seemed very, very loud. She wondered for the first time if anyone could hear them, up here, through the walls. It almost made her laugh. Still, with the jaw in her hand, she cradled her arms around his neck and gave herself, waited, eyes closed, filled with a new earnestness and compassion as she felt his rhythm change, and his breathing broke into a moan of desperation, and he came inside her, hard, and he buckled, nearly collapsed, his weight heavy and even on top of hers, his face buried in the space between her neck and her shoulder. She could feel his breath, hot and fast, his hands tangled in the plump nest of her hair. In that moment, she felt such possession over him. This sort of holy moment in which she was both a mother and a girl. So she lie still beneath him, strong and holding him while he found his full consciousness, while he caught his breath, opened his eyes, and came back to her there, in the daylight.

Finally, they found each other. It was a strange awakening. The light in the room was weird and new, almost pink, like being inside a crystal. She didn’t know if it was magic or just a trick of the sun coming through the windows. Solas, lifting his head, looked right at her, exhausted, his gray eyes clear and renewed. She didn’t know what to expect. Disarming, he smirked. It was playful.

“Hello, vhenan,” he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Elven translations (including literal and contextual):
> 
> (Full breakdowns of these translations can be found in my work "Full Elvhen Translations: The Dead Season.")
> 
> “Sar ena’sal’inen sulena sul’ga’lan hartha.” - "Your victories speak for themselves." Or, more simply, "Scoreboard." (Literal: "Your victories sing for all to hear.")
> 
> “Dirthas vi’dirth’el’vhenan, melahn ar’an ele palal.” - "Speak Elvhen when we have sex." (Literal: "Speak our native language when we are having sex.") - Though you can feel free to get dirtier if you want, ie: “Speak Elvhen when we fuck/when you fuck me/ when I fuck you.” etc. - It's the general feel of the thing. 
> 
> "Eolasan, Solas." - "Yes, Solas." (Literal: "I understand, Solas.")
> 
> “Vianas mar’vhenan sul’em.” - "Open your heart to me."
> 
> “I’tel’ma, sildearan aron adahl i’tel’gen’adahl.” - figurative: "You make me feel like I'm part of something bigger." (Literal: "Without you, I feel like a tree without roots.")
> 
> “Ma’dun isal, aron arlater isal vunlea. Sildearan bellanaris or’vhenan.” - “My body longs for you like a cave longs for sunlight. I feel too much." - (First sentence is a literal translation, second is figurative. Literal translation of second sentence is, "I feel eternity of the heart.")
> 
> “Ar my garem.” - "I am here now." (Literal: "I have arrived.")
> 
> “Ar isalan rosas’da’din sul’em, Solas. Rosas’da’din inor’em.” - "I want you to come for me, Solas. Come inside me."


	5. The Eye of Friendship

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After reaching a strange new place with Solas, Sene gives in to girl talk with Sera. Meanwhile, Dorian and Solas discuss matters of the heart in the Undercroft. Friendships change and grow as the ball at the Winter Palace draws near.

Quietly, they dressed. Solas, his chest no longer bare to her, set the pendant in a calm pile on the bedside table, and she wrapped herself in a robe of red cotton. She fluffed her hair, found a few tangles with her fingers. Now, it was time to go.

“Are you all tailored for tonight?” said Sene as she walked him to the door. “Your suit, I mean.”

“It was finished yesterday,” said Solas. He put his hand on the back of her head and kissed her hard on the forehead. “ _Ara vhenan_ ,” he said. “You’ll be fine.”

“ _Enaste_ ,” she said.

Then, they heard a strange sound—a high, familiar laugh—on the other side of the door.

Solas gave her a look.

“That sounds like Sera,” she said.

“Oh, good,” he said. He opened the door. Sera stood there, smiling quite big and pink. “Hello, Sera,” he said.

“Solas,” she nodded.

"Sera,” said Sene. “What are you doing here?”

“I was coming to see you, Quiz.” She turned to Solas. “What are you doing here, Solas? Coming or going? Or just coming?”

Solas gave her a look. A little scheming. Then he looked back at Sene. He put the hair behind her ear and snagged a single pin from somewhere inside her great, red nest. He set it between his teeth. “I’ll see you at the gate, _avise'ain_ ,” he said, a secret smile, then he walked through the doorway and looked back at Sera with his hands in his pockets, chewing that hair pin. “I imagine I’ll see you as well, Sera. Dareth'shiral.”

“Bwah. Quit it with that tripe.”

“ _Ma nuvenin, lethal’lan_.”

She made a loud noise with her tongue. He smiled again. “Tonight, ladies. We dance.” Then he bowed once and left. Sera closed the door behind him.

“Smooth,” said Sera. “What’s on with you two?”

Sene blushed. She swept the hair out of her face, clipped it at the back of her neck. “We’re—you know. Don’t pretend you don’t know.”

“Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t.”

“You’re being cryptic.”

“You’re the one being cryptic. I know the two of you have been banging bits for weeks, but it’s like…he’s _always_ here. Or you’re there. You’re together. Always. Hands. Faces. All touch. Look, maybe you think I’m judgy. But I’m not. It’s just—it seems like more than just bits with you two.”

“I mean, it is,” said Sene. “It feels like more than…bits.”

“Ah-ha! So there are bits. You just admitted there are bits!”

“Of course I did. You already knew that.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not the same as hearing you say it, is it?” She laughed again, went over to the couch. Sene followed. Sera, she noticed then, was wearing a long, green skirt that seemed an unusual choice, and her short, yellow hair was pinned to the side with a blue flower.

“Did you just come from somewhere?” said Sene, reaching for the flower.

Sera slapped her hand away. “Hey! Hands off.”

“You look…nice.”

“Had breakfast with the arcanist. So what?”

Sene, oddly warmed by this, shrugged her shoulders. “No reason.”

“So,” said Sera, straightening the skirt around her knees. “Tell me about the _elven man_.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Well, he’s your first, right?”

“Wow,” said Sene. “You just come right to it, don’t you?”

“Oh, come on. Out with it already. You’re nineteen. So unless you were rolling around in the weeds with Dalish boys back in the Free Marches...Andraste help you if you were…”

“Dalish boys?” said Sene. “No. Definitely not. I mean, one kissed me once, and there was a city elf who would share his elfroot. But the men are smaller where I’m from. Almost like women.”

“Right? Small men have small pricks. ‘Specially elves. Bleh. But Solas. He’s a…he’s big for an elf, right? Big for a…man. Tall, that one. Sort of willowy.”

“Willowy,” said Sene. “He’s sort of that.”

“Does it seem weird to you, that he’s so tall for an elf?”

“We're all tall for elves. Why would that be weird?”

“I don’t know,” said Sera. “He just seems…weird. Too elfy. Hurts my head.”

“He’s a little weird,” said Sene.

“But you like it,” said Sera. “Gets you all bothered.”

“That he’s weird?”

“That he’s so _elfy_. He’s like this big, bad elf you never got being Dalish. Bet he yells _ELVEN GLORY_ when he does it, yeah?”

This sort of amused her. “Last week I saw him punch a Templar in the face in the Hinterlands," she said. "That was pretty bad. I'm not sure how _elfy._ But its something."

"I thought I heard something like that," said Sera. "What the shite happened?"

"Things got out of hand," said Sene. "Solas the apostate. There were words."

"So he used his fists? A mage who hits things? Sweet fucking Andraste."

Sene shrugged. She thought it had been interesting. Or, mostly she had liked it because, afterward, he'd let her hold his hand by the fire for a very long time. She'd studied his knuckles, bruised and scarred. His palms were tough.

Sera shook her head out all fast. “There’s just something about him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” said Sera, scratching at her ear. “You never answered my question, Quiz. Quit dancing.”

“Which one?”

“Your first? It's Solas, right?”

Sene shifted around, felt a little itchy herself. “Yes,” she relented. “He is. Solas the big, bad elf is the proud usurper of my virginity. Happy?” She tightened the robe around her waist. Even the thought of him then, in that moment. It sort of had her…bothered.

“Very!” said Sera, and she laughed, and then she clapped Sene hard on the shoulder and said, “Not so hard, is it?”

“What?”

“Talking. About stuff. To me. Unless we’re talking about Solas. In which case, it’s probably pretty hard.”

“Sera.”

“Bet he’s hiding a big one in those jammies, right? Solas’s _great big staff_.”

“Sera!”

“All right. Come off it. But be real. You ever notice how like, when we’re out, hunting Templars or whatever, how he'll conjure that great big fist thingy and punch them right in the tits? Or when he drops all those like, boulders from the sky? Or wherever. Makes the whole battlefield glow. Is that sort of like his prick?”

“A giant fist thingy punching people in the tits? Not entirely.”

“It is creepy though. The boulders. Not his prick. I mean, hopefully. For your sake.”

“Solas's magic is not as creepy as Dorian's.”

“Right!" said Sera. "Ghosts. Not right. I prefer blades, right? Shiny, but metal. Real. I like that you’re all arrows, like me.”

“You don’t think the magic is…neat?”

“Sometimes,” said Sera. “But mostly, I think it’s dangerous. Too weird. Too many directions. Like it could be everywhere and nowhere and then…poof,” she sort of trailed off, a little anxious.

“I guess,” said Sene.

“Does he do magic?” she said then. “When you’re getting him off?”

“No,” said Sene.

“Never? Not even on accident?”

“Never. Sometimes before. He doesn't tend to lose focus easily.”

“That's not surprising. The focus thing. Though with the magic, I figured he’d be all _Fade Fade Fade magic in my ass._ Or something.”

“We’ve never done it in the Fade.”

“ _Never?_ ”

“We kissed there, once. But it was a really long time ago, when we first got to Skyhold. Now he says he’ll only take me if I ask.”

“And you never do?”

She thought about it then. No, she never asked. But why? She wasn’t sure. She could no longer remember. Of course, it had been about bodies— _real_ bodies. And he no longer seemed to need it like he used to—the Fade. At least not with her around. But did she want to go? What kept her? “He’ll find me and take me along sometimes, when we’re both sleeping,” she said. “But we never—we’ve never… _you know_ …in the Fade.”

“Hmm,” said Sera. “Curious.”

“Perhaps.”

“He’s been a little…nicer lately, yeah?”

“He’s trying.”

“What’s with all that stuff—like the other day in the Hinterlands. Talking about Red Jenny. Giving me advice?”

“Solas loves giving advice. He’s very good at it.”

“Yeah well, he should have off. I don’t need advice.” She became serious then. It was strange for Sera. She took Sene’s hands into her own, then she focused particularly on the left one—the anchor. You couldn’t see it now. It only glowed when a rift was nearby. But Sene could always feel it, a little. Pulsing in there. Reminding her. Sera studied it and wrapped it up in her own hands, which were bigger than Sene's. “But still, he’s doing it for _you_ , yeah? Trying to make nice on your friends. Even when I bug him. That’s…nice.”

“He _is_ nice. Not in a typical way, but in his way. Thoughtful.”

“Never really thought so before,” said Sera. Then she kissed Sene’s hand and placed it delicately back in her lap. Sene blushed. “But look. You work hard, right? You’re the Herald thingy. _Inquisitor Lavellan._ All big and important. Even though you’re not so big, not so bad. You’re just a girl.”

“What are you on about, Sera?”

“I’m on about—what I mean is, you’re _you._ You’re not a symbol or a name. You’re just you. Dalish girl with red hair and weird luck. People look at you and they see something glowy. Blah blah blah. Andraste’s chosen. Escaped the Fade. All hail the Lady Inquisitor. Whatever. But not me. When I look at you, I see _you._ ”

Sene smiled. She didn’t know what to say.

So Sera went on. “And Solas,” she said. “He sees _you_ , too. That’s why you’re with him, right? He looks at you all grays and angles and makes you feel like _you_. Behind the door, in here, in tents, under covers where it’s not all ass mages and Templars. Just bits and pieces and smells. With him, you can be you. So what I’m saying is, whatever. Solas is weird. He’s elfy. I don’t always get it. But I’m glad you do. You work hard. You deserve some happy there. And if it’s Solas, well, then it is. He’s not so bad, ‘specially from behind. Everyone’s meant for someone.”

Sene felt warm and important to be Sera’s friend just then. Like she’d won. Her heart was full. “Thanks, Sera,” she said.

“You're welcome,” said Sera. “Now when will the elf girls be here? The ones who are tailoring the ugly jackets we’re wearing tonight?”

“They’re coming here?”

“Haha. I told them!”

“Do they know to come here? They aren’t scared?”

“Of course they’re scared,” said Sera. “You’re the _Inquisitor_.”

“You’re not scared.”

“Of you?” Sera laughed and shoved her off the couch. Totally off the couch. “Whoops.”

So Sene yanked at her green skirt from the floor, scheming. Sera plopped down there with her.

“Shall we invite the arcanist?” said Sene, snatching the flower from her ear.

“You!”

 

As Solas left Sene’s quarters and entered the great hall, he was straightening his sleeves, fussing with his collar, when Dorian approached him.

“Solas!” said Dorian. They stood awkwardly there, in the center of the hall, a great many onlookers standing by with prying eyes. Most of them, Solas was not even sure what they were doing there. He recognized a few mages among them, and some Chantry sisters. The Chantry sisters trusted neither him nor Dorian and struck them hard with these divine yet chilling sidelong glances. In this particular instance, Solas and Dorian were more alike than either would probably have cared to admit.

“Dorian. How can I help you?”

“I was just searching for you in the rotunda. When you weren’t there, I should have figured you were with the Inquisitor. Do you have a moment?”

Solas dug into him at first, with a look of suspicion, but Dorian, for once, was earnest. He lowered his guard. “Of course," he said.

“Our company has been requested in the Undercroft. By Dagna.”

“The arcanist? What for?”

“Apparently,” said Dorian, “there are new armors.”

“Really. Sene didn’t say anything.”

“Perhaps she wanted it to be a surprise.”

“Perhaps,” said Solas.

"Shall we?”

“Fine,” said Solas. “I’m curious to see what’s in store.”

“Oh, something fabulous I assume,” said Dorian. “For me at least. For you, I’m guessing more barefoot-in-the-woods. Green. Odd belt made of rope. Something to that effect.”

“Don’t be so sure,” said Solas, his hands clasped behind back as the two walked side by side to the Undercroft. “I’ve not been consulted on the matter of these _armors._ For all I know, the Inquisitor has plans to dress me in nothing but a fashionable loin cloth of plush fustian velvet.”

“The apostate jests!”

“When the mood strikes.”

 

Upon entering the Undercroft, they were greeted immediately by five or six flitting young women, all of them elves, wearing servants clothing. They were tailors. They giggled as they ushered the men inside.

“Your arcanist,” said one of the girls. “Dagna.”

She had a leaf in her hair as if she’d been rolling in the garden.

“Good to see you, Dagna,” said Solas. “How are you?”

“Oh, I’m wonderful,” she said.

"You’ve got a look about you, Dagna,” said Dorian. “Somebody new in the picture? A lover, perhaps? Sweeping you off your feet on this invigoratingly crisp Skyhold morning?”

“Dorian, please,” she said, but she was blushing.

“Ah.”

“Inquisitor Lavellan put in special requests for both of you about a week ago when supplies came in,” she said. “Masterwork Battlemage armors, designed appropriately to your tastes, specialties, and…well, I guess what she wants you to look like.”

“So it is then,” said Dorian to Solas. “ _Loin cloths_.”

“Excuse me?” said Dagna.

“Don’t mind him,” said Solas. “Continue, Dagna.”

She took a deep breath. “Okay. Let me present them to you. Girls?”

Two of the elven tailors appeared then, each pushing a mannequin on four wheels, and fashioned upon them were two very different, striking sets of armor.

“Dorian, this is yours,” said Dagna, gesturing to the one on the left. “Silks and leathers of ram. Inquisitor Lavellan specifically wanted silvers and rich browns, a balance of magic and earth. Elegant, luxurious, but understated. She said your magic and all of its ferocity—that it speaks for itself, that you need no introduction in the way of flashy armors.”

Dorian approached the armor, touched the silken sash. “Surprisingly understated. I’ll take two.”

“Solas, yours is much different.”

“Obviously,” said Dorian.

“Hush!” said Dagna. “Solas, here you’ll see canine furs, infused vyrantium samite, and leather of the quillback. She chose the quillback carefully, for the grayish blue.”

“Brings out his dreamy eyes?” said Dorian.

“No,” said Dagna. “Well, I mean, yes. But that’s not what she had in mind. While your armors have a more natural cut and appearance, Solas, the blue brings a…supernatural appeal. Mind you, these are her words, not mine. It’s about power. Your power. Over the Fade. You are a Dreamer, and the Inquisitor felt strongly that blue was the color for dreams. Also, she thought you could use a color in general. You know, other than green.”

“I could not agree more!” said Dorian.

“Thank you, Dagna,” said Solas, taking the pelt between his fingers, examining the armor closely. “These are canine furs?”

“Yes, sir. They’ll keep you warm.”

“I see. These will do nicely.”

She approached him then, beckoned. He had to bend a great distance so that she could whisper in his ear. “What’s it like?” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“The anchor. Up close. Have you touched it?”

He stood up then, smiling. “Of course I have,” is all he said. This left her in considerable suspense.

“Shall we try these on?” said Dorian. “I don’t know about my friend Solas here, but I certainly don’t want my armors hanging in the waist.”

           

The two stood then, outfitted, on a platform in the center of the Undercroft. One of the elven girls had a measuring tape cinching Solas at the waist. He held his arms out in front of him, studying the leather, how it clung, climbed. A strange vine. He decided he liked the blue. There was something imposing about it, something cold and sleek and pure, like ice.

“By the Maker,” said Dorian. “Solas, you look almost presentable.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“I want to say that our Inquisitor has a unique and surprising sense of taste for a Dalish elf, but then again, before her, I’d never actually met one. I suppose I figured all elves ran around wearing tattered rags and leaf coverings for bottoms.”

“While I’m sure I don’t agree with your frequent stereotyping of elves,” said Solas, “in this instance, you are right. It is quite surprising for a Dalish elf to have any sort of unique sense of style.”

The elven girls whooshed and measured, pins in their mouths and fingers, pressing them to the fabrics with careful expertise. Dorian became pensive. Solas surveyed him from the side of his eye while one of the girls brought the measuring tape from his waist up to his shoulder. Putting his hands on his hips, he accidentally brushed her on the neck. She giggled, then ran away to whisper with her cohorts.

“They’re starstruck,” said Dorian.

“Hmm,” said Solas, preoccupied.

Dorian stepped down off the platform then. “Excuse me, ladies?” he said.

“Yes, Lord Pavus?” said one—she had hair of brass, all kinked as nettles.

“Would you give us a moment. I need to have a word in private with my friend.”

They all straightened up then, becoming serious. The girl with the brass head bowed. “Yes, of course.” Then, they disappeared out the door and into the great hall.

Solas waited, curious. The encounter with Dorian that morning had been surprisingly least objectionable, almost painless. He stood with his arms by his side. It felt odd to be so one-on-one with the Tevinter by the blue light of the Undercroft, dressed in flashy new armors designed by the woman that each of them loved—in his own way. And yet, there they stood. Dorian stepped back onto the platform and approached him.

“Solas,” said Dorian.

"Yes.”

“I—I wanted to apologize.”

“Apologize?”

“Hear me out, will you? I know that you and I have never…gotten along. Not really. Mostly for good reason. And I’ll admit that, at first, I was suspicious of your intentions with Sene, and of hers with you. I didn’t trust it. It seemed dangerous.”

“I understand your concern, but I assure you—”

“Just let me finish, yes?”

Solas nodded respectfully. “All right.”

“When Sene and I went forward in time, when we saw what was going to happen to the world should Corypheus get his way, we became friends. Instantly. I was bonded to her and saw it in my will to protect her. Heinous chivalry, I know. But then she helped me through that bit of nastiness with my father, and well…I’m not a man who’s loved many women, as I’m sure you know. And don’t get me wrong, this is certainly not about _romance_. But it is a kind of love. She’s a true friend, unlike any I’ve ever had. Naturally, I wish to preserve it. In any case, when she first took to spending so much time with you—an apostate with somewhat hazy origins—I was wary. As were many others. Some still are. Some still don’t know. But then I watched a moment between her and the Commander unfold, not too long ago, and it told a story I’m not sure I expected. He was weak from lyrium withdrawal, and she’d been supportive. Do you know of that which I speak?”

“I do,” said Solas. “She told me of the walk she took with Cullen in the garden, and of the compliment he gave her. It was innocent.”

“See? Ah. There it is. Of course she told you. Yes, they were walking in the garden. He complimented her in a way that suggested his interest, and she—with no rudeness, no anger at all—rebuffed him, kindly. It was almost as if nothing had happened. It was out of loyalty, to you. This was surprising. It suggested the two of you are more serious than maybe I’d initially assumed.”

“Simply because she showed no romantic interest in an advisor weakened considerably by lyrium addiction? That is surprising?”

“No. It was the manner in which she showed no interest that was surprising. She was off-hand, confident. Never blushing or pausing to question, neither offended nor even considering him as a possibility. Do you love her?”

Solas cleared his throat, looked away.

“You do,” said Dorian. “I understand you’re not wanting to discuss it with me _,_ but I know you do. I’ve noticed a change in both of you. In her. Of late. She’s stronger now, better, more confident. She approaches matters of great terror and uncertainty with ease and curiosity. She used to be, not scared, but worried. Nervous. She’s young. It was only natural she be intimidated by the events unfolding around us. In any case, this change in her, I know that it’s at least partly to do with you. Other than what I’ve seen in passing, and what I’ve heard going bump in the night, I realize that I don’t truly know what goes on between you, what you discuss, what you give her, and what she gives to you, but I do know that, whatever it is, it seems to be…a good thing. So I wanted to apologize, Solas. For not trusting you at first, and for letting my opinions about your…opinions…cloud my perception of your relationship with the Inquisitor. You are good for her, and well, she’s done something for you as well.”

Solas looked down at his hands, adjusted his sleeves, smoothing his fingers over the blue of the quillback. “Thank you, Dorian,” he said. “I appreciate it. Though I still maintain that no apology is necessary. I understand your reservations, and while I’m glad you’ve changed your mind, the truth is, your love for Sene makes me…extraordinarily grateful. It is good to know she has a friend so pure and singularly devoted. It makes me happy.”

“It makes you happy,” said Dorian. “Well, goodie. That’s all I've every truly wanted. A happy elf at my disposal. Now, if you don't mind, I’m eager for intrigue. And expensive wines and cheeses. Should we get out of here?”

“I’d love nothing more.”

Dorian shouted to the girls outside. “You can stop listening through the door now and come finish with your duty,” he said. He looked back at Solas. “They’re all in love with you, you know.”

“I wonder why."

“Because you’re the _bad boy_ _apostate elf._ Apparently you punched a Templar in the Hinterlands? News travels fast.”

Solas smirked. “Indeed it does.” The girls came back in then, their whooshings recommenced. The crumpling of measuring tape, the silver pricking of pins.


	6. The Dance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At the Winter Palace. Sera and Solas jest at the party. Solas and Sene dance on the balcony. Dorian and Cassandra discuss, witness a sad development. Back in her quarters, after a long night, and with their relationship now out in the open, Sene asks Solas some desperate questions.

“Solas?” said Sera. They were sitting together at a table in the grand ballroom of the Winter Palace. The band played behind them. With Dutchess Florianne in chains and a much lauded truce achieved, the party had taken form. The night had both ended and begun. Solas was not listening, of course. He watched Sene out on the balcony instead as she conversed with Morrigan, arcane advisor to the Empress. Black-haired woman, vaguely familiar. He just couldn't place it.

“ _Solas,_ ” Sera said again. “Hello? Earth to elfy.”

“Yes, Sera,” he said, finally.

“I have a question for you.”

“Wonderful. Let’s hear it.”

“This morning, I heard you call Sene something—a word I’d never heard before. _Avisa…Avisinaily-thing…Avi…sa…thingy…_ ”

“ _Avise'ain_ ,” said Solas, drinking from his cup—a rich, red wine, as velvet. He preferred whiskey, but this was a party in a palace. There was very little choice in the matter. He finally gave Sera his full attention. “It is a term of endearment," he said. "The blunt translation is _little flame._ ”

“Little flame,” said Sera, giggling, tipsy. “Because why? Because of her hair?”

“Partially,” said Solas. “It also takes the form of her _sel’malin_ , which is Isene.”

“Have off. What?”

“Sene is a nickname. Her given name is Isene, and Isene means _like fire. Avise_ means flame. Therefore, _avise'ain_ , little flame _._ ”

“She never told me anything like that.”

“Even I had to ask, Sera.”

“Right, and you’re the _elven man_ ,” she said, putting a grape into her mouth and then, in disgust, spitting it back out again. “Bleh. Noble grapes. Daft piss, feet, ass.”

“You are quite the charmer, Sera.”

“Yeah well. Solas. I have another question.”

"Hmm?"

" _I. Have. Another. Question_."

“I'm sorry. I wasn't aware we were continuing the conversation. Please, ask away."

“It’s about Sene,” she said. “She’s got red hair, right? On her head, I mean.”

Solas sighed. “Her hair is red, yes. Dark red.”

“It’s pretty. Like fire, I suppose. I would say apple, but you say fire. Apples and fire. Both pretty things. But red. Anyway. What I’m asking is, is it red everywhere?”

“Excuse me?”

“Oh, come on, _Solas._ We’re friends. It’s red everywhere, right? Tell me.”

 He raised his eyebrows, took another drink, and smirked.

 At that moment, an elven servant appeared at their table. “More wine, Lady Sera?”

“More wine?” she said. “Is that a serious question? But I’ll do it myself, yeah?”

“It is no hurt, Lady Sera. I do not mind.”

“ _Ma serannas, da’len_ ,” said Solas, holding out his glass so that the servant blushed. She tipped the pitcher.

“Panty-dropper,” said Sera under her breath, holding out her own glass now. “What’s your secret, Solas? If you truly are in the Inquisitor’s breaches, tell me. Little flame or what? Is it all _ELVEN THWOAR! FIERY ELVEN MAGIC!_ down there? Come on. I’m pissed, and we won. I want a party.”

“Since there seems to be little possibility of you shutting up about this,” said Solas, “I’ll give you this much: _Melahn garan Senere mor’vharla or’avise, dinan la shenan sal._ ” He took a sip from his wine.

The elven girl’s face turned extraordinarily red after this. She straightened up after refilling Sera’s glass and then giggled into her hand.

“Piss off,” said Sera, looking at the girl, then looking at him. “Bugger. You troll.”

With this, he pushed back his chair and stood from the table. “I'm out,” he said. He bowed to the elven servant. “Dareth'shiral, da’len.”

“Dareth'shiral, ha’hren” she said, stifling a smile, and bowed.

As he walked away, he could hear Sera interrogating the servant. “Come on, now. What did the elven man say? Come on. Come on.”

It took a moment for Sera to intimidate a translation out of the elf, but once she finally did, her rank, plucking laughter ensued. Solas finished his wine, set it on a tray with one of the servants, and was promptly handed another.

As he stepped out onto the balcony, he passed by Morrigan, and she nodded in his direction, once. Then he went right out and leaned against the railing, next to Sene. He drank a bit of wine, handed her the glass. She studied it in her hand, took a long drink, and sighed. Together, they surveyed the blue horizon and the weary stars overhead. She seemed tired, perhaps jaded from the night’s unfolding. She moved closer to him, instinctively, put her head on his shoulder, but she was still very serious. There, they stood.

“I am not surprised you're out here,” he said. “Thoughts?”

“Not really,” she said. “I’m enjoying the moment while it lasts. ”

“As you should,” he said. “These nights, they're fleeting enough. Hang onto them when you can, vhenan.”

There was considerable laughter then, a swell of cheering as the music changed inside. He saw her look back, longingly to the ballroom, but something was in the way. That night, her strength and adaptability had shone without falter, and now, she was so high up, still covered in armor and steeped in the game. She was naturally guarded, and he felt her distance. So he placed his hand on her back, and this instantly changed things. He felt her physically relax beneath his touch. She looked at him.

“Come,” he said, unwinding the moment. “Sene, before the band stops playing. Dance with me.”

He bowed, but it was sort of ironic, and he smirked at her, and she laughed as she took his hand. “I’d love to,” she said, this creature of his very own. "But no more bowing."

"Noted," he said.

 

Back inside, observing their dance from afar, Dorian leaned against a table, sipping his sixth or seventh glass of wine on the night. In all honesty, he’d lost count.

“Dorian,” said Cassandra. She approached him from behind, seeing what he saw, looking surprised. “Did you know about this?”

“You didn’t?” he said.

“I…had an inkling,” she said, looking down, hurt. “I only wonder why Sene—why the Inquisitor did not tell me herself.”

“Lady Cassandra,” said Dorian, putting his hand on her shoulder. A gesture of comfort, reassurance. “Have no fear. She only kept it a secret because she thought no one would understand.”

“Do you approve?” she said.

“I did not until recently,” he said, “but I was mistaken. I believe the apostate’s love to be true.”

“I suppose I should trust you,” said Cassandra. “Though I must admit, I find it difficult.”

“Completely understandable. I am a _mage from Tevinter,_ after all.” This drew a smile. He went on, “Where is your wine, Lady Cassandra?”

“I—I must have misplaced it.”

“Here, take mine. I need more anyway.”

He handed her his glass. She took a long drink, wiped her mouth on the back of her hand, a tomboy, despite her noble blood.

That is when, in the ballroom, a sad scene unfolded before them. The Commander, ragged and tired from the night, came to the bottom of the stairs and saw what they saw. He was sober—with the lyrium withdrawal, he could not afford to lower his inhibitions—and in that moment, his face fell, considerably. At some point, he finally turned around, seeming alarmed, disappointed, the lights gone out of his pale eyes. He was confused. Always couped up in that tower, busy being the Commander, unnerved from his addiction, he had not seen what was right in front of him. He looked at Cassandra, then at Dorian, but neither made a gesture or knew what to say. The tension between them turned to sorrow. Cullen nodded in acknowledgment, bowed in shallow form, looked down, and took his leave, disappearing into the crowd.

“The Commander has eyes for her,” said Cassandra sadly. “It is no surprise. I’m sure many men do.”

“Not me,” said Dorian. “I have eyes for the Commander.”

“You jest,” said Cassandra, “but what’s happening here could have tragic results.”

“How so?”

“Our mission is important. The Inquisitor cannot afford to be clouded by emotion at this time.”

“Emotion can be a wonderful thing. A driving force. You, of all people, should understand, Lady Cassandra. And in any case, does Sene not deserve a bit of happiness, for all she’s sacrificed? She’s chosen Solas. If we trust her, we should trust her choices. Even if they seem…odd.”

Cassandra sighed, softened, watched the dance carry on. Solas held the Inquisitor closer now, her body against his. They had slowed. Like a scene from one of her books. He had his eyes closed, his cheek pressed firmly to her forehead, and there seemed a dire attachment between them. Something pure and deeply private, almost a clutching desperation. Cassandra wondered how she had not seen it before. It was so terribly obvious to her now. She blushed. She looked away. In her heart, Cassandra knew she was a romantic. She was embarrassed by this. She had never known true love herself, but seeing the Inquisitor now, experiencing such purity of emotion, she allowed herself to feel hope. “I admit, I am skeptical,” she said. “But Sene deserves happiness. True happiness. You are right, Dorian.”

“I’m always right,” he said. “How sad you’ve only just figured that out now.”

She sighed, exasperated. “Let’s return to the party,” she said. “I’m not nearly drunk enough for this.”

“That’s the spirit!” said Dorian, putting his arm around her, guiding her away from the balcony and back to the ballroom.

There, Sera had managed to convince the Iron Bull to dance. The results were both shocking and magnificent. The Orlesian court had no idea what to make of them and the strange, joyful air of this new _Inquisition,_ but one thing was for sure—they laughed. Tremendously. And they poured more wine. And it drew their eyes away from what was really happening, out on the balcony—between the Inquisitor and her apostate. Their careful, quiet dance. The timing was curious. Intentions unclear. And whether Sera did it all on purpose just to protect them, to give them their moment, unsullied, no one would ever know.

 

Later that night, after the Inquisitor had retired to her private quarters in the Winter Palace, Solas came to her door.

“Solas?" she said.

"Yes, vhenan. It is I, your elven serving man Solas."

She smiled and let him in. The two had parted some time after the dance, as the company of the Inquisitor was desired and requested far and wide, at all corners of the ball. It tired her, but he kept his distance, always a careful watch. Any time she came near to him, he reassured her with a touch or a piece of warm advice, and she went back on her way. Occasionally, members of the Inquisition would come to speak to him as well, and he paid them gentle heed and was attentive when necessary. At one point, the Iron Bull came by simply to clap him on the shoulder, hard, and congratulate him. “Love is a beautiful thing, Solas,” he said, raising his eyebrows suggestively. “Can’t say I blame you. I have a thing for redheads myself. Something about the...fire.”

“Thank you, Bull. I do know what you mean.”

It seemed word had gotten to everyone.

In her quarters now, she had undressed, and she wore nothing but a chaste, white robe, her hair in strong ringlets, recently washed, dried, and combed, around her shoulders. The room smelled clean. She had her own private balcony where, together, they went out to stare up at the moon from a foreign angle. It was watchful, as a great eye. She was wistful and seemed uneasy. He put his arms around her. In all of the time they’d spent together, they had learned each other’s languages, their silent desires. He made it easy for her to relinquish control, and with him, she did not hold back. When they held each other, these exchanges carried out seamlessly and with every breath. It was a sort of transcendence for him. He had never felt so singularly free and alive and understood. Not in the Fade. Not before.

“I watched you,” he said to her, “all night long. You have earned your place here, vhenan.”

“I don’t want to think about it. Let’s just be us.”

“In that case, you smell like fruit,” he said, “and expensive soap. I wish you'd waited for me.”     

She smiled. “I miss Skyhold,” she said.

He placed his face into her hair, surrounded, kissed the back of her neck. “I do as well,” he said, “but you must admit, Sene, there’s something about this place. The Winter Palace. It is mysterious.”

“Everyone knows,” she said then, still preoccupied. “About us.”

“Yes, I noticed,” he said.

“Does it change things?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“What’s the matter, vhenan?”

She turned around in his embrace to look at him. He put a piece of hair behind her ear. She took his hand and kissed it. “I’m worried,” she said, looking up at him with her wide, green eyes—they had the terrible power to collapse his heart.

“What worries you?” he said, concerned. “ _Vianas mar’vhenan sul’em_.”

“I keep thinking you're going to leave me, Solas.”

This took him aback. He felt deeply strange and affected. He lost his composure. He almost questioned himself, in that moment. He had not questioned anything in such a long time. He had been living one breath to the next, had hardly stopped to consider—anything. She seemed strangely close to tears. He knew she’d had quite a bit of wine. He could smell it on her breath, but that wasn’t all of it. They’d endured a day and a night of prying eyes and watched relations. But in that moment, all he wanted was her. “Why?"

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s just…a feeling.”

“Did I say something?"

“No—Cole did. A couple of weeks ago. But—”

“Cole?”

“It was stupid. I don't know why I can't shake it.”

“Vhenan,” he said. He held her face in his hands, looked her straight in the eye. This would be the purest moment of his undoing. This is where the end began.

“I'm sorry,” she said. "It's just been a long, stupid night."

“Do not apologize,” he said.

“I just—I feel like, all this time, every choice I’ve made. Somehow, we’ve won. Maybe this, what I’m feeling about you, maybe it’s actually about something else.”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m waiting for something bad to happen.”

“Something bad? Well, I’d argue that you are.”

“What?”

“Something bad is going to happen.”

“Solas—”

“Sene. The world burns as we speak. It is beyond our control. For as long as Corypheus lives, bad things will continue to happen. Tonight, many terrible odds and schemings came to fruition. I am not surprised you have felt it, the tangible creeping of fate as the end draws near. I have felt it as well. All that we’ve encountered in Halamshiral tonight is but one more dark reminder of that which has not yet passed.”

“Okay," she said. "You're right."

“But nothing can find us here," he said. "All right? Heed your own heart, Sene. _I’em, ane amem._ ”

Their eyes, locked. Gray on green. She smiled.

“Solas," she said.

"Yes, vhenan."

"Can we go to the Fade?

The question surprised him. There, in all of his convincing, his speeches about the pleasures of the real, she was asking for dreams.

“Is that what you want?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Everything you just told me. Your right. And, and— _Isalan na in’then’sal’shiral._ Always. But right now, I don’t _want_ to be _here._ I want to be anywhere _but_ here. I want to be somewhere else.”

“Okay,” he said. “I will take us to the Fade, if that is what you want.”

“It’s what I want.”

“ _Ma nuvenin_ , vhenan _._ ”

He took her hand. He lead her to the great, silver bed in the middle of the room, sat her down, and then he sat down beside her. Quickly, he framed her face with his hands and kissed her on the mouth. She looked desperate, anxious. He had not seen her like this in some time—so unsure. What Dorian had said in the Undercroft earlier that day had rung true. She was a changed woman, stronger, and while he knew he had done something to show her the way, mostly, he knew that the credit was her own. He had laid paths before her, but she chose to take them. Only a strong mind can choose to improve, to become more aware of that which ails it. Sene was never weak, was only young. He touched it then—the pale green of her vallaslin. He so rarely saw it anymore. But it was there.

He could tell that she was eager. He had never done this before, not truly. The first time he’d taken her, it had been surprise. Then, every time after that, it was only in dreams. A pure consequence of sleep, and innocent, always. Now, for some reason, there were a great many uncertainties. They lie down together, Solas wrapping his body around hers, but she wanted to face him. So she turned around, their foreheads touching, knees folded into one another. They held hands in a pile between them, close to and between their hearts. She closed her eyes instantly.

“Will it be okay?” she said.

“We'll be safe,” he said. It was all he said. He closed his eyes.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Elven translations:
> 
> “Melahn garan Senere mor’vharla or’avise, dinan la shenan sal.” - "When I enter Sene's city of flame, I die and am reborn again." (aka: "Yes, it is red everywhere. But I am Solas, so let me troll you with Elvhen sex poetry.")
> 
> "Vianas mar’vhenan sul’em.” - "Open your heart to me."
> 
> “I’em, ane amem.” - "With me, you are safe."
> 
> “Isalan na in’then’sal’shiral.” - "I want you in waking life." (Contextual: "I want your physical body."/"I want you in real life.")
> 
> “Vis ma garas suin em inor’Elgar’vhen’an, Solas…” - "If you make love to me in the Fade, Solas..."


	7. Pride

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Solas takes Sene to the Fade. Strange omens find her. Things change.

When she opened her eyes, she lie nestled in a dream. A bed of furs. It was a forest. The leaves hung like bells from the trees. They sang, sweet. She sat up, wearing her robe, only it was no longer white. It was gray, satin, silver. There were birds, somewhere, and the world was wet. Had it been raining? Sun trickled through the canopy, and she was alone. Her hair was down, the curls sleek. She found her reflection in a creek that reminded her of home. She looked for him, but he wasn’t there.

“Solas?” she said, barefoot, her toes just touching the edge of the water. But she didn’t say his name again, or too loud. It felt strange to utter it here.

She heard a noise then, in the trees behind her. She turned around and there, she saw a child.

“Hello,” said Sene. She was not afraid. The child was an elf, wearing a green dress. She had red hair tied in a loose braid down her back. She must have been about four years old, and she looked familiar, but Sene couldn’t place it. She went closer, got down on one knee, held out her hand. “I’m Sene,” she said. The child approached. She was holding something in her arms. It was white and covered in fur. “What do you have there?”

“Wolf,” said the child.

“Vhenan.”

Startled, she stood, turned around and saw Solas, standing by the creek. When she looked back, the elf child was gone.

“You scared me,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “What did you see?”

“Nothing.” He was no longer wearing the formal attire from the ball. Instead, he was dressed how she knew him—pale shirt, soft. She saw light coming from his eyes and from his hands as he stood there. At first, she thought it was sunlight, but it was not. It was permanent.

“You’re glowing,” she said. “Why are you glowing?”

“I should ask you,” he said. “This is your dream, not mine.”

“It is?”

“We’ve walked enough in my dreams. I thought I would take us somewhere new.”

“How did you know it would be so pretty?”

He smiled, comforting. “I didn’t,” he said.

She went to him, took his hand, standing with their feet in the water. It bubbled past them, cool and clear. “I like it better here. Thank you for bringing us.”

“Of course, vhenan,” he said. Then he became serious. His eyebrows drew together. Something about him, uneasy.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

He was lost for words again. “I know that I have a certain relationship with this place that you don't always understand."

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Only that I need you to know that I prefer reality," he said. "With you. Do you understand that?"

“Do you not want me here?"

He took a piece of her hair between his fingers. “I want you everywhere. That’s not it. But what we are, I don't know if it translates here.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re real,” he said. "More real than anything I've ever experienced in the Fade. It's changed my perceptions in ways that I cannot explain." 

She studied his eyes, picked up his face into her hands. Her robe, the robe she wore, she realized then—it was his eyes, gray, made fabric and pressed to her skin. This is what her mind created in the Fade. “Try,” she said.

“Being with you here,” he said, and he took her hands, held them to his chest, "For once I am not sure how to conduct myself in the Fade."

“Then I can do it,” she said.

“Do what?”

“Conduct you." She made a face. "Or, something. We’re here because I asked. Just keep us hidden. Let me lead. For once.”

In his eyes—she could see it then, hesitance. She felt him holding out, and she would have to go slow, to draw him to her, as she had done many times before, long ago, when they first got to Skyhold. Being in the Fade now, she felt no worries, no fear. She felt safe, protected. She knew how to unlock him, his heart, his body. It had taken months, but she had learned. Solas. So stern, so in control. Such pride. So many secrets, small miseries she uncovered and healed, one at a time. Such old, deep pain and loneliness from a life hinged to dreaming. She loved him for it, all of it. The complexities, the oddities and how he tried. It enchanted her, and it made him strong. He overpowered her, pure as nature, and she let him. In many ways, she was beholden to him, but she knew it to be a product of passion. She knew as well that the fear he would leave her seemed abstract now, a product of her devotion. That is what love it. It is the worst thing, the careful balance. In love, there is always, above all, the cold, undying fear of losing. She knew this now, now that she knew love.

"Solas?" she said.

"All right," he said, finally. "Yes, Sene. That sounds just fine"

She smiled, and she kissed him. “Are we safe?” she said.

He nodded. _“Ele amem,_ vhenan.”

Then, without another word, she put her guard down, all the way. An invitation for him to do the same. She knew how much he desired vulnerability, but it was hard for him. She played at the fabric at his waist, groping downward, wrapped her hand around him, and tugged him toward her. A deep sigh emitted from somewhere inside him, a grunt of arousal, surprise. He closed his eyes. He yielded to her, brace himself against her. Despite his hesitance, he was fast to respond, eager, and it did not take long for him to harden to her fully. Her long, firm strokes. He held tight to her hair at the back of her skull. She sensed the need building inside him, stronger, aching. He pressed his mouth to her ear, but he did not say anything. Just breathed. In and out.

She asked him then, “Is this real?” But it was different this time. It was to teach him, not to question. He understood.

“Yes,” he said, his voice gravel in her ear.

“ _El vhen’an in theneras sasha?_ ”

“No, _avise'ain_ ,” he breathed. So deep, growls. Barely words at all. “ _Ele dunathen or’ala’syl’ise’man, Sene. Or’arlise. Ele dunen, nasen, nas’falonen._ ”

“I think so, too,” she said, and she could sort of sense him smirking into her hair. He was ready.

Glancing to the earth, she realized the creek had gone away, and they stood now in a verdant clearing in what appeared to be the Emerald Graves. White flowers and clean air. Why here? Had she brought them? She didn’t know. Didn’t care. She saw the green of the canopy, the sun breaking through the leaves and scattering to the grass in pieces of gold. Focused. She held him as some ancient statues rose around them, crumbling in their worship. She did not fear. She worked him hard now until she felt him break, felt him weaken. It was a tangible moment in which he laid himself bare to her. She heard his heightened, fractured breathing, his hands grasping down the length of her back and pulling her hair hard until her head went back with it, and he brought his mouth to her neck.

He lost patience then picked her up, held her so that she looked down from up above him. She was tall, and she wrapped her legs all the way around him, kissed him deep, and he removed her hand from where it held him hard, and he looked at her, hard, and then they went together and lie down in the dampened grass of the clearing.

There was an urgency, but he found composure, removed his shirt, her robe, touched her. Everywhere. Her body, so familiar, as hearth fire, cold nights and sticky mornings. The shapes and the puzzling contours, all of them coming together as his place of worship. Despite this, and how intensely he desired and held to her body, here, now, in the Fade, he did not feel compelled to study it. He had done that, again and again. Over and over, had memorized, every fraction compounded by lust in his memory. He only wanted to feel her now. He eased his fingers inside of her. The wet, no matter how many times he’d felt it before, excited and made him grateful. Then, in pure, primal form, he traced his lips the full length of her torso until finally, he took her into his mouth, and she made long, slow noises, then there were gasps. She was strong, even in the Fade, and he had to hold her hips into the grass to keep her still. All of her pleasure places were exactly as he knew them, exactly as they should be, exactly hers and the shapes he had memorized, and he knew exactly how to appease and to incite her agony. He had done this to her many times before, but never with such a singular conviction to please. To exhaust her with need, desire, comfort. He would fill her now, thank her. For everything. In the Fade, he thought, it is all heightened. It is somehow more real, and yet it is not. But his need for her had not changed. This had worried him at first, that he would not feel the same. But now, he felt her from the inside, consumed her. The worry was gone.

He slowed, bringing right to the edge. She held his face so that their eyes met. She said his name again and again. A jeweled crown of language. He crawled toward her as an animal, kissed her mouth, letting her taste herself—it always made her more eager. He angled himself upright on his knees with her hips tilted high, long legs splayed around him. His clothes were just a pile in the grass beside them. He went deep right away, buckled inside of her, swallowed, and with a single thrust, she came, furiously. He felt her, the squeeze and the rush, watching closely, holding her hips, using the soft part of his thumb now to press, and to bring her even further.

When she was finished, legs shaking, cheeks flushed, he leaned forward, positioning himself over her, smoothing the hair off her face, revealing the freckles and the sweat and the pale vallaslin.

He dug his hands into the grass then, went deeper, continued. She was just a bundle of nerves as he fucked her, naked in the sunlight, a cool, green clearing in the energies of the Fade. Her arms splayed as branches, her head tilted as she watched him, such strange, mortal, creaturely grace. And as he held her, he hastened his pace, and she, solid beneath him, began to guide him with her hands as she recovered from the throes of ecstasy. She eased his rhythm, keeping him focused on her, on the feeling that she gave him. He wanted so badly to say something, but there were no words for this. She reassured him with her own silence and her composure and her utter willingness. But before long, she was lost to him. As she always got, bright and hot and beyond control—just as she was in battle, as a hunter in the purest form of the word, his _avise'ain_ , and now, she begged him with her hands— _faster, more_ , _harder,_ and he obliged her.

As things continued to escalate, he could start to feel it—the magic inside him, unleashing, rising to the surface of his skin and of his mind. He was a well-designed mage, versed endlessly in self-control, but in the Fade, like this, his magic was unbound, unstable, a strong, persistent effervescence that he could not restrain. He felt out of control. It was unusual. He felt his power in the Fade, fully, his connection to the Veil, growing and how it took hold of him and how it moved inside of her, becoming them together, and between and among their tangled shape formed a green energy, a humming light, and Sene’s hand—the anchor—began to spark and glow.

“Solas?” she said right away, confused.

He took the hand, enclosed it in the fortress of his own, and shook his head, placing his face next to hers. “Don’t, vhenan,” he said, his voice breaking as they paused their conquest. He covered her bare body with his, possessed her fully. “It cannot hurt you. It is just the Fade.”

“We’re both glowing,” she said. “The whole world is glowing.”

“It is me. _Sou’i’ve’an._ ”

But then, breathless, she tucked his head down into to her chest, softly, a holy gesture that quieted, comforted, reminded him. This was it—license to lose himself, to be free. Like the previous morning in her quarters at Skyhold, when, somehow, she had found her way into his will, giving him permission to let go, to renew himself inside of her, as a man. He craved it. Hot and flesh and sweat, loud and bright as crickets in the garden, the heat of the hearth in a winter storm. The damp haven of her body. Red hair, rose cookies. The taste of strong wine on her breath, the taste of her, and her smell in the morning, how it exhausted and aroused him. All of their need together. It was a maelstrom. He knew then, in that moment, he could no longer envision a life in which he did not walk beside her.

As he came, he looked up, up. His bearings, his focus gone, his body a haze, a mere notion. And that is when he saw—the statues from before, their faces, employing in his base and filth, empowered by it, taunting, stone and cold. Though he knew it was no one he knew, still, he knew it, and he was hard-stricken with anger. A deep, bad, old anger as some demon infiltrator, somehow, having slipped past him and into this, his territory, attempted to spy on their love-making.

Sene noticed, too. Something changed. “Solas,” she said. “We are not alone.”

He called out words of ancient darkness that he did not know still lived inside him. Relics of terror from a time before when the world burned. As he did this, Sene watched the dream collapse around them, and the sky grow black, and lightning struck the earth, scorching the grass, leaving smoke and a smell of burning. The statues crumbled, the prying faces turning to dust as Solas raked her up from the earth and held her to his chest. Still inside of her, but then, no more. He withdrew from the Fade, but she did not follow. Not right away. Something held her there, without him.

“Solas?” she said, suddenly alone. He was gone, and the world was dark. There was a loss, somewhere. She could feel it, like a very old friend had died. Scared, she felt around for him, filled with the irrational fear that he had never existed at all. The earth shook, and then, suddenly, she could sense the Veil. It was there, right beside her, in front of her, everywhere. She could almost touch it. She got to her feet, mustered her bravery, said his name again. She knew someone—something was listening, but she didn’t know what. She only knew that it was not Solas. She heard a voice. It echoed.

_Where is your pride now, Inquisitor?_

That is what it said. Laughter. Cold.

_Where is your pride?_

“Whatever you are,” she said, her voice shaking, "you can go fuck yourself. None of this is real."

But then, her hand—the anchor, it began to hurt, to sear, as if on fire, and she screamed out in pain. She was standing at the maw of a great, dead existence. The Black City—she could see it. Way out there, like teeth in the sky. She was wrapped now in a clinging robe of sorrows and when she looked down at the anchor, all she saw was an empty heart.

She heard him calling out to her from a great distance.

“Where are you?” she said as the winds got stronger. “Solas. I can’t find you.”

“Sene,” he said. “Isene. Come back to me.”

 

She opened her eyes in the Winter Palace. She sat straight up, the covers a mess beneath her. She was wet, bothered, jarred. The world bore into her with its animal parts, made her hurt. But there he was, real.

“Solas?” she said.

He held her hands together, staring into her eyes, trying to decipher her fear. “A demon of desire. Sene, are you all right?"

“It’s okay,” she said. “It's okay. I don't get how I got left behind."

“I did not mean to, vhenan,” he said. “I tried to bring us both, but the mark.” He held her hand, showed her. “It's magic anchored you, somehow. I didn't know.”

“It felt real," she said.

“You should know as well as I what it truly feels like to walk in the Fade. This was not the same.”

“I know,” she said. “I know.”

“We are both okay,” he said, placing his hands inside the deep red curls of her hair. How he longed, in that moment, for Skyhold. “It was only a dream.”

But as she clung to him then, it did not feel that way. She remembered it all. The child, the wolf, her ecstasy in the clearing. How he had been dark and strange, and the gaze of the demon. She remembered Solas’s power, how he compelled the energies of the Fade, emitting green magic from his very pores. She remembered his anger as he struck down the sky, and left her.

 

As she slept that night in his arms, the memories from the Fade dissipated, blurring into a haze of pleasure and only a vague sense of fear. She was not a mage, and like always, the specifics would drift away, eventually. But still, she kept waking, rattled, frightened by the voice, its familiarity branded into her mind. It had sounded so much like the Nightmare demon—the one who had chased her, physically, through the Fade at Adamant. _Where is your pride now, Inquisitor?_ said the voice, again and again. _Where is your pride now?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Elven Translations: (including literal and contextual):
> 
> (Full breakdowns of these translations can be found in my work "Full Elvhen Translations: The Dead Season.")
> 
> “Ele amem.” - "We are safe."
> 
> “El vhen’an in theneras sasha?” - "Does our love live in waking dreams alone?"
> 
> “Ele dunathen or’ala’syl’ise’man, Sene. Or’arlise. Ele dunen, nasen, nas’falonen.” - “We are living, breathing creatures of earth, air, fire, and water, Sene. Of the hearth. We are bodies, souls, meant for each other.” (Contextual: This is purely figurative and impressionistic. It is an expression of purity and truth in the moment, ie: “We are real. We are home. We are soul mates.”)
> 
> “Sou’i’ve’an.” - "Power of the Fade." (Contextual: "Virility of the Fade.")


	8. The Emprise du Lion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Weeks after the Winter Palace, Sene, Solas, Sera, and the Iron Bull endure the sucking chill of the Emprise du Lion. Solas and Sene manage to steal time together. Suledin Keep is a place of triumph and dark trials.

After the Fade, Sene found herself in what felt like a perpetual state of want and worship. She had dreams of his back moving away from her, this pale triangle in the green shade. They went to the Emprise du Lion where everything was cold and bright and dangerous. The fighting was brutal, and the cages of people everywhere made the days feel endless in their unraveling. With Solas, Sera, and the Iron Bull, each battle blew off victorious, huge explosions of energy and wrath, but civilians were dead, and Sahrnia a frozen wasteland of sad, red buildings with no rooftops. Sene had never been to a place so dire. The bigness and strangeness of it made her feel lonely. For the first three nights, they’d had to camp in a quarry surrounded by the dead lit veins of red lyrium. The lyrium glowed through the fire, illuminating the snow, keeping everyone awake, bandaged and bruised, all four of them piled into the Inquisitor’s tent where nobody wanted to be alone. Death was too nearby, they decided. Things were better together. Exhausted, hardened, dirty, cold to the bone. Drinking warm ale brought in by Scout Harding’s people, gnawing pieces of rabbit Sene had hunted herself and then cooked on a spit. Iron Bull tried entertaining with mad stories from his stranger youth. He and Solas played whole games of chess through the power of memory alone, and Sera braided Sene’s hair, and asked her all kinds of questions about her childhood and her love for the _elven man_. She told her about Dagna, that the two had started a quiet affair, and she had such stories of Red Jenny and her foreign life as an elf of the city. Sene listened eagerly, all the time, finding Solas with her eyes, and he would give a small touch. Security in a place of death and blood in the snow.

Despite Sene’s dreams, whenever they slept in the Emprise du Lion, Solas held her with serious possession. He slept deeply when he drifted, without stirring, and his arms hardened around her as stone. A carefulness and new severity imbued them, each movement guessed and exchanged as mind-reading. Somehow, it felt new. Sera noticed one morning, as Solas helped Sene into her jacket: “You do that like it’s all you’ve ever done,” she said to him.

“Perhaps it is,” said Solas. “Perhaps each night I help Sene out of her jacket, and then each morning, I help her back in again. Would that shock you?”

“The two of you,” said Sera. “Like green on sky. Eggs on toast.”

“Interesting perspective,” he said.

Sene turned around, put her hands on the fur of his collar, straightened it. “What are you two on about now?” she said. Sera laughed. Solas kissed Sene’s plucked a pin from her hair and put it in his mouth. Sene kissed his freckles. All of it had become so regular, like the sea. Like the moons. Campfires and smoke and wolves singing at the sky in the distance. This, in all of its intensity, reassured her.

 

They rested a day and a night before storming Suledin Keep. It would be their final trespass before heading back to Skyhold. In the very early morning before the assault, with only the scouts awake at sunrise, Solas conjured a pot of veilfire, and the two of them went hunting for elven glyphs. They found one, after only an hour, as Solas could sense its magical swell, and it led them deep into the hollow of a snowy dune. Imprinted to the wreckage of a fallen spire, it called to them, twinkled, little song of history.

Alone at last, they built a fire. They laid their weapons down, bow and staff, and Solas removed her jacket and the heavy winter clothes, and then she pressed him into a wall of gray stone so hard, little pieces of it came tumbling down on them. It had been almost a week since they’d last touched. In the Emprise du Lion, there was simply no time, only red death and misery. So it was frantic at first, stolen, and getting lost in the skin and the exaltation of survival. It was strong and real. But she took control, wanting more than this, poured over him hard, and in her searching, she found new battlescars on his skin, strange burns and places he’d been nicked by the enemy in the Emprise du Lion. His wounds worried and excited her. She kissed them, quiet, and then she told him to lie there, and though he was impatient, he did not question, and he did not protest, just stared up at her, steel and cool. It took her a while to get rid of the winter pelts he wore beneath his belt, but once she did, she went down, took him into her mouth, deep, nearly choking at first. She didn't care. She worked him wet so that he lost his breath, backed into the wall in a moment of near shock, finding rocks to hold onto, then his hands in her red hair, pulling. He held on behind her ears, and she watched him put his head back and look up at the pale morning sky. She kept going until his voice was breaking, and his breathing sundered. His voice got deep when he was ready to pop. She felt the need then, as she switched to her hand so she could look him in the eye. She was overcome with the responsibility to please him. She wanted him thumping and begging and weakened beneath her, ragged and spent and with nothing left but empty lungs and clarity. So she pulled into his lap, eased down, rode him and and squeezed, pressed into his chest with her open hand so that he could not take her for himself. He was hers. In that moment, sweating, floating beneath the call of elven magic, she was determined to please him, to exhaust him and to make him remember what it meant to walk physically in the mortal world, with her. The act did not take long. He lost it quick, and as he came, his natural strength emerged, and he lifted them both off the ground—just for a moment—latched to her hips, his primal sounds the strange, deep swells of a man at her mercy, assuring her that her work was done. She felt him fill and nestle to her, complete.

He opened his eyes right away then, as if seeing the world from a new angle. He covered his face with his hands. He was shaking his head. “Fuck,” he said. “My heart.”

She smiled, blushed, her arms wrapped around her chest in a weird, momentary return to modesty. She climbed off of him. He sat up and leaned against the gray stone wall of their snowy retreat for a moment. Spent, he crawled toward her and put his head in her lap as a creature. “ _Sa sahl,_ ” he murmered into the soft of her freckled thigh. “ _Manhiman laim inor’menan or’na. Or’then’avise. Ara vhen’an._ ”

“We have time,” she said, petting his head there.

"It is not enough,” he said. 

When they returned, Sera and Bull were awake, readying for the coming battle. Sera was washing her face in a pot of warm water while Bull stood looking at his reflection in a frozen pond, beating at his chest with the hilt of a woodcutter’s axe. A strange calm of understanding had descended upon the camp. No one questioned or worried where they had been. Two elven lovers disappearing to make love in the dawn hours was a small, good thing, and there were just too few small, good things in the Emprise du Lion. They let nothing go to waste. They just knew, and it was good. Each of them piled on their armors in preparation and left camp when the sun broke straight overhead—a dead, yellow pearl way up high. The day was blanched. It was too cold and dead for anything more.

They traveled most of the way in silence, but as they began to sense the coming carnage, the mood finally began to loosen. Solas asked Bull an odd question about how he managed to fit shirts over his great big horns. Sera nudged Sene’s shoulder and walked right beside her, right up close.

“I know what you did,” she said, and laughed in her way. “Glyph hunting my arse.”

“We _were_ glyph-hunting,” said Sene. “We even found one.”

Sera snorted.

Straight ahead then, Solas stopped. He turned around, pensive, sniffed the air, and looked at Sene in a moment of odd epiphany.

“What is it now?” said Sera.

“Sene,” he said, his brow furrowed as a question, “have you aged?”

“Excuse me?” she said.

“Forgive me,” he said, as if surfacing from a dream. He looked around, almost embarrassed. “Just now, I sensed a change.”

“You can _sense_ her _aging_?” said Sera. “What is it with you two? Nutters, I swear.”

“Happy birthday, boss!” said Bull, clapping her hard on the shoulder.

She looked down at her gloved hands then, as if that would somehow answer Solas’s question. “It could be,” she said. “This is the right time of year. But I’ve lost track of the days.”

“I’m certain,” said Solas, sensing her self-consciousness. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“It’s okay,” she said, blushing.

“Let us proceed,” he said. “We can celebrate when we get back to Skyhold.”

“All right. Something to look forward to as I’m hacking the heads off frozen Red Templar assholes,” said Bull.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Sera, kicking at the snow. It crunched beneath her boots. “It’s good, right? Getting older. Means you’re not dead yet.”

“Good point,” said Sene.

“Now tell us how you did it, Sol- _arse_. You can smell it on her or what?”

“Sol- _arse_?” he said. “Really?”

“Oh don’t get your breaches in a bunch. If you're wearing any.”

“You charm,” said Solas. “And yet I resist, every time.”

She laughed. Sene blushed. They forged ahead, as one.

 

The fight at Suledin Keep was long and uncoiled with a kind of unexpected, brute elegance. The battle began so smoothly, that the four of them wondered out loud at the stories they would tell upon returning to Skyhold. They had fought so hard and so much in this frozen pit of despair, that their work became near choreography. _Practice makes perfect_ , the Iron Bull said, his sword in the ankle of a giant in the courtyard. The blades and brutality of Sera and Bull, yanking scalp from skull, spine from throat, as Sene perched with her arrows, her elemental mines that exploded into a thousand colors and shrapnel spiked with chill, and Solas rained down upon them all with a hail of fire and stone ripped from the Fade, taking the great threat of the behemoth and reducing it to ash. They were animals, all of them, battle-born beasts. Bull could be heard roaring with the noises of sex and seduction as he cudgeled and decapitated all the way across the battlefield. The war appeared to be won. At least the war of this hell, the Emprise du Lion.

And perhaps this is the thing lowered their guard. They became complacent, and on their path, had drawn the ire of a true enemy. For Imshael himself was a desire demon, seemed charming and flippant at first, but he was angry, unhinged. Four alone had invaded and usurped his regime at Suledin Keep and the Emprise du Lion at large. He blamed the Inquisitor. He wanted her—she could feel it, creeping. And so, as the group and its powers were engaged in massive combat with the desire demon himself, Sene stood lonely atop a great staircase, firing her arrows with a cold precision, when a Red Templar Shadow flanked, then sneaked up from behind. She sensed him coming, jerked forward, but it was too late. He put his red lyrium claw into the soft below her ribs, penetrating the leather armor, impaling somewhere in the back of the gut. And though he’d been aiming higher—for the heart, of course—he got her good and deep enough to take her to her knees, and she lost her breath and went down without a word.

Sera saw it happen—like slow motion. She had blood in her mouth and in her eyes. The fight was bad. It was really bad. _Inquisitor’s down!_ she screamed, putting her blade into the gullet of a Fearling. Searching for Solas, she worried he had been taken out as well, but then it happened so quickly—Where the Inquisitor lie at the top of the stairs, Solas was already up there, and he took the Shadow by its neck, picked it straight up off the ground over his head, and with a single gesture, turned it to ice, shattering the frozen Shadow with his bare hands. The look upon his face, madness. The Shadow fell to cold pieces, tumbling down the stairs, and Solas fell upon his lover and scooped her into his arms and shouted to Sera through the electricity and the rage and the pride: _FINISH IT._

She nodded, readily, and together, with the Iron Bull, the two of them chopped and sundered and ended the fight. As quickly as they could. Andraste guide them.

Afterward, the courtyard stank of burning bodies. The red lyrium, it whispered things Sera wanted to forget from her childhood—the man who tried to do the baddie with the thing and the girl with the iron tooth and the pan. The burning from the hot of the blade when she tripped down the wrong alley at sunset, and all that itchy fabric. She shook her head and spun around, and Bull was standing there, his great big hands on her shoulders, shaking her.

“The battements, Sera. Boss is down.”

She was dizzy, terrified.

“You need me to carry you?” he said.

She shoved him hard, but he didn’t budge. His chest was just a great big rock. “Piss off,” she said, rubbing at the back of her brain with the palm of her hand. “Daft rage. I can’t think!”

“I was being serious.”

“Well, don’t do that! Blood, bad. Go, now.” Together, they tore up two flights of stairs.

Out on the battlements, by a great flagpole, there was a dead Templar and Solas, on his knees, huddled over the Inquisitor. She was quiet. Sera felt her heart go blind.

“She’s not—She’s not—? Solas?”

“She is alive,” he said. “Help me, please.”

She got down on her knees. The Inquisitor, her strange, red fountain, best friend, pretty girl, green eyes closed, on the cold, gray floor.

“I must turn her over,” said Solas. His voice, fearful, breaking. It scared her. “Please, just hold her head so that she can breathe.”

“I got it,” she said. She held Sene’s head to one side, rested it in her hand so that it didn’t have to touch the icky cold of the battlement. Sene’s head the apple. Shiny and round and red, like new.

“Shit,” said Bull, watching, standing. It was all he said. “Shit,” and “Shit.”

Sera saw what Solas had to do—he’d have to cut through the armor. The wound was in her back. She gave him one of her daggers, the good and balanced one. The other was gnarled winchy and only she knew how to wield it right. Didn’t need mistakes, not now, she thought.

“Thank you,” he said. With deft hands, he cut through the seams of the armor. Precise, as if he’d done it all before. With the seam undone, he let the dagger clank to the stone, removed the dark leather panel from her chest, and Sera helped him discard it, and then she watched as, with shaking hands, he peeled the shirt back from Sene's pale skin—matted, wet. The wound was red and unbearable, bleeding and round. Like a mouth wanting to eat. She focused on Solas instead. He removed one of the pelts around his neck, pressed it hard to stop the bleeding. He was shaken, losing his breath, unraveling quickly. His face going pale, the freckles louder than she’d ever seen them. His gray eyes like the night and water. She needed to do something. She looked at Bull, but Bull had his head down. So she placed her other hand, the one that didn’t cradle to the Inquisitor, firmly on Solas’s shoulder.

“Breathe, right?” she said to him. She could feel the blood in the creases of her palms. In her hair. “Sene needs you to breathe. So please, okay? Breathe.”

He found her eyes. He nodded, solemnly.

He checked beneath the pelt. Together, they surveyed the wound. Sene's breathing was shallow and uneven. Sera had to look away, but Solas, wise one, saw things she couldn’t. He was still unsteady, but focused now. She didn’t take her hand off his shoulder the whole time.

“Can you fix it?” she said, in a whisper. “Please say it. Please.”

“It will hurt,” he said.

“Will she wake up?”

“Yes.” He looked to Bull. “Please, Bull. Hold her shoulders. She’s strong. I just—if she wakes. She’s very strong.”

“Sure thing, Solas,” he said, head hanging, horns low. He dipped around and knelt and with a careful touch, held Sene’s shoulder’s to the ground.

"Sera, press this pelt very tightly to the wound until I tell you to remove it."

She obliged. “What will you do?” 

Solas didn’t answer. He closed his eyes—tight at first, like in pain, and he shook his head again and again, as if trying to wrest an image from his memory. He was composing himself. He blew into his hands, and then he cupped them together and held them against his closed mouth. There, a kiss. His forehead relaxed. His brow softened. His breathing slowed. A pale green light, a bright pool, broke through the cracks in his fingers. He opened his eyes, opened his hands, and there, was a little butterfly, flitting between his palms, all made of green magic. It was alive, a strange and sharp being, and from it, emitted such sweetness and energy.

“What the—”

“A spirit,” he said. “It is a spirit.”

“Spirit? A tiny butterfly?”

“Shh. Sera, please. Remove the pelt.”

His voice breaking again, she renewed her grip on his shoulder, took away the pelt and set it, bloodied, on the stone ground. She knew she could be daft, insufferable at times. And so could he. But Solas had tried to be nice to her, to be her friend. For Sene. All that time spent in the Emprise du Lion. Shit place. Like acid hellscapes, snow for days and the red haze of endings. She thought they could be friends now. “I’m here,” she said.

“Oh, vhenan,” he said. He pleaded. He put one hand in her hair, smoothed the curls. “I beg. _Sal vun’in. Sal era’vun. Sathan._ ”

His desperation, it was a song. So private. Sera looked away, just for a moment. She did not look back until she was sure.

He set the butterfly to the bleeding wound, and he blew on it. It melted into the dark and faded away. The bleeding stopped. For a moment, everything was quiet. The sky was a white plain. You could hear the wind in the trees at the base of the Keep.

But then, thrashing. Screaming.

“What’s happening?” said Sera.

“It’s healing. The wound is large,” said Solas, his hands pressing Sene’s hips into the stone, holding her still.

“What’s that mean?”

“It is essentially a method of advanced cauterization, Sera. It means the magic is burning her from the inside.”

“Andraste,” she whispered.

“I’ve got her,” said Bull.

“Give her to me,” said Solas. “Please. Gently.”

Bull and Sera both helped turn the Inquisitor to her back, the half-armored chest, blood-wet shirt dragging up her side so that her freckled ribs poked out. Sera, frantic, reached, pulled it back down again. Solas was gentle and cautious. So knowing in the way he held her. It was terribly romantic, Sera thought. And frightening. And sad. She feared for him, for her. For all of them should the Inquisitor die there. Can't think of it. Don't. She thought of Dagna instead, but it didn't stick. Sene stopped flailing once she was in Solas's arms, only flinched now. As a bird, and she called out for him in a strange, weak voice that was scary. Sera wanted to scrape the sound of it out her ears and cry. She very nearly did, felt Bull then, tugging her in tight instead. She clutched to him, his greatness, the solid breath and steel. They both watched as Solas held the Inquisitor to his chest, cradled, rocked, brought her face into his left hand, all sticky with her blood, and he held her there, fierce and focused into her until finally, she opened her great, green eyes. Like rift energy.

“I—” she said, out of it, gone far. “Solas?”

He smiled once, to comfort her, then closed his eyes. He put his hand over her face, to close hers as well. She didn’t fight him. “Sleep, vhenan,” he said, once, and she went limp in his arms. "Sleep."

All was sweet and quiet and cold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Elven Translations:
> 
> "Sa sahl." - "One moment."/"I need some time."
> 
> “Manhiman laim inor’menan or’na. Or’then’avise. Ara vhen’an.” - "I float, lost, in a waking sea of you. Of your flame. I love you."
> 
> "...Sal vun’in. Sal era’vun. Sathan." - "Another day. Another night. Please." (ie: "Don't leave me.")


	9. One Third

For two days, he hardly slept. The ride home was long, the two of them stashed in the back of a covered wagon pulled by gray horses. He’d removed his coat of armor, but her blood—it was everywhere. On his clothes, in the creases of his skin. He’d tried washing it out in a basin before they left, but every time he looked at his hands, more seemed to appear. It had stained him. She slept soundly as she healed. He’d hidden her deep in the Fade, a place she would not remember and would not fear. A place of childhood and sun on her face. Warmth. Blue flowers on a pale tree, and her father. How he told such stories. Solas went to her sometimes in dreams, but for the most part, he just let her live. Small and brown in the sun, red hair, her own. Still, her voice—he missed it, desperately. He longed to hear her talk at length about anything. About books, about archery. About Sera. He didn’t care. The world was an endless, silent tunnel without the sound of her. One of the scouts tried to bring him something to eat in a silver bowl, but he refused. He’d been callous, cold. He regretted that now, but he was outside himself. He tasted metal and was very thirsty all the time. This was his love now, in the back of a wagon, his little flame, his brutal heart, and it was as he both feared and desired her: the impatience of her mortality. For as long as he had known her, he’d never felt so singularly frightened of what lie ahead.

Her wound had closed up by half and turned black as a stone. He checked it frequently. One of the healers in their camp at the Emprise du Lion had made a strong poultice, which he changed carefully every few hours on their way back to Skyhold. The healer had offered to ride along and do it himself, as it was a complicated process, but Solas could not bear the thought of a stranger. It was difficult and mean work, peeling away the mixture, formed and soft, dried and smelling of plants. Replacing it, new. But he did it anyway. Once he finished, he would regard the long, firm skin of her back, the freckles and the musculature. This had the power to make him weep. Her body, such strength and grace, the pool he had drunk from time and time again—it had been defiled.

Sera and Bull had ridden ahead to make sure that word of the Inquisitor’s injury stayed contained. While the fact could not be kept secret, they did not want to worry the entirety of the Inquisition and its wards and allies over the matter of her near-death. That would have been irresponsible, especially given their exalted triumph in the Emprise du Lion. He did not know what would come next, or how long it would be before she could truly ride, truly fight again. He’d told Sera to find Dorian first, tell him exactly what happened. He didn’t want the Tevinter taken off-guard when Sene arrived, still unconscious. Had the Emprise du Lion been a place where two mages were needed, Dorian would have been there along with them. He was one of her closest friends. She would ask for him upon waking and, in weakness, would be comforted by his bravado. Solas did not care about this. He sat with her in the wagon that stank of old linens and drifted in and out of the Fade, waiting. Sometimes he studied her hands, the mark, its singular power, and kept them safe inside his own. But he knew he needed to contain himself. He could feel it—a darkness, rising. It was a dangerous omen. He could not afford to linger too long on what might have happened had the Inquisitor died at Suledin Keep. She was not dead, and that was all that mattered. For now.

They arrived at Skyhold in the middle of the night—on purpose, so as to avoid conspicuousness. The stars overhead were bright and weary as the castle slept, but you could hear the sounds of the Herald’s Rest even still. A distant jubilance. There to greet them at the gate were Cullen, Dorian, and Josephine, in addition to several high ranking officers who were there presumably to keep guard. All looked worried. Josephine was without her clipboard and quill. She held a lit torch high, her hair a black curtain around her shoulders, and she seemed to be wearing silk bed clothes—as if she’d been taken off guard. Cullen stood as a tower, watching, hardened to the moment, and Dorian, dressed and steeled, had his hands clasped behind his back, though his face was vulnerable. The gray horses shifted. You could see their breath. A stable boy came with two buckets of water. Solas stepped out carefully, one foot at a time, Sene, still unconscious, a great rag all piled in his arms. He looked back. The blood-stained jacket hung off the back of the carriage, but then it was gone. There was a breeze, and a quickening, and then there was Cole. He stood before Solas, holding the jacket, looking down at the blackened smears.

“This is a relic,” he said. Then he looked up at Solas from beneath the brim of his hat. “It will always burn.”

Solas said nothing. Cole put his hand, a great paw, on his shoulder. “She does not hurt,” he said. “She is hidden. You hid her, because you walk in shadows. But she is happy there.”

“I know,” said Solas.

Cole seemed to sense the wound then. “It is healing,” he said. “Standing, aiming, screaming bright, cold, the desperate plea of people in cages with their backs to the bars. Only she sees them. She hates the world around her, because it reminds her of the scary stories her father used to tell, where everything is brown. But then—veil fire. A green shape parting the plaits of her hair. Warm. She is dreaming of you, Solas. But you are hurting more than she is, and she doesn’t know. _Sal vun’in. Sal era’vun._ You froze him. He shattered. You watched him fade away. There is a small voice, like a candle in a winter storm, but it's fading. I—I don’t understand.”

“Cole,” said Solas. “Please, not now.”

“Cole.” It was Dorian now. He had approached quietly when Solas wasn’t looking and put his hand on the young man’s shoulder. “Why don’t you return to your quarters?”

“I would like to keep this,” Cole said of the jacket, bunching it up in his hands and pressing it to his chest.

“Keep it,” said Solas.

Cole was gone.

The two men stood. Solas could not meet the Tevinter’s eyes. Dorian put his hand on the Inquisitor’s hair, cradled her head. “Sera said a Shadow.”

“There was no red lyrium in the wound,” said Solas. “Just a simple spirit.”

“Little green butterfly, right?”

“Where is Sera?”

“She’s in Sene's quarters. Been there all day.”

“We should go.”

“Why don’t you let me help you?” said Dorian. “I can fetch the healers. The healers at Skyhold are very attentive, Solas. They'll come to you. You look like you could use some rest.”

“I appreciate it, Dorian,” said Solas, “but no.”

“I figured as much,” said Dorian. “At least tell me if you're all right.”

Solas looked down at Sene. Her lips were pale, her face serene. “It’s been a very long week,” he said. “I would just like to take her home.”

 

That night, he and Sera both stayed in Sene’s quarters. He had offered Sera the couch, but she was content to just sleep on the mat in front of the fire. She scraped a whetstone down the length of one of her daggers for a good hour in silence as he lie there, unable to do anything but stare at the ceiling and listen, mesmerized, to the long, metallic sound.

"Are you awake?” said Sera after a long while. She’d stopped with the whetstone now and just sat, staring at the hearth. It was warm and steady.

“Yes, Sera.”

“I just—nevermind.”

“What is it?” he said, in earnest, turning in the couch cushions to face her.

She looked back at him, only just, her face half-glowing from the fire. “She’s in the Fade?” she said.

“Yes. She is safe.”

“How can you do that? How can you just put someone in the Fade?”

“She’s dreaming,” said Solas. “I’ve just hidden her, so no nightmares come to pass. So she doesn’t feel any pain. She’ll wake up on her own when she’s ready.”

“Hidden her?” said Sera. She wiped a few tears from her cheek with the back of her hand. “Hidden her where?”

“Mostly, they’re dreams about her childhood, in Ansburg.”

“What does she do there?”

Solas turned onto his back and put his hands behind his head. “She practices with her bow,” he said. “She plays hide and seek with her cousins. Her father is there. He tells her stories.”

“Is it pretty?”

“Yes. The trees are verdant and tall as spires. The sky is a rich blue. There are whole fields of grazing halla and little nugs that get lost in the gardens. An abundance of flowers and farm fields and vineyards. It’s very pretty.”

“I’m glad,” said Sera. “I’m glad it’s pretty. She deserves pretty.”

“She’ll wake up,” said Solas, facing her again, an effort to convince himself as much as Sera. “She will. It is only a matter of time.”

“Time we don’t got, right?” said Sera, trying to laugh, hugging her knees to her chest. “I miss her.”

“Me, too,” said Solas.

“I’m glad you were there,” she said. “To—you know.”

“I could not have done it without you,” he said.

“What, for holding her head in my hand?”

“Yes,” said Solas. “And for reminding me to breathe.”

This truly did make her smile. She curled up then, on the mat, facing him with her back to the fire. She closed her eyes. “Goodnight then,” she said.

“Goodnight, Sera.”

As they both lie there, scattered hearts in darkness, Solas was overcome with gratitude for Sera. He remembered how she had once seemed so brash and so simple. Almost an abomination, but now he knew this was merely an illusion. A sort of cover. Her heart was big. She scared easily. She was a child, a confusing creature, insufferable but now, it seemed, wholly necessary. In a way, her odd rejection of elven culture had become a redeeming quality that, the more time he spent with her, the more he understood. The world had changed. He had failed her. Now, she was outside of herself in many ways, but as he watched her and the way she cared so deeply for Sene, and how it was more than just blood ties, he began to see the truth.

Once Sera was asleep, he got up from the couch. He went to Sene, laid beside her, pulled the sheets to his chin. He had not slept separately from her in months. Her physical presence beside him as he walked in the Fade was an anchor, perhaps the one thing he truly understood in this world.

 

When he found her in dreams that night, it was yet again in a memory from her childhood. She was a tall girl, maybe twelve years old, her hair a ball of tangled red curls on top of her head. She was young for her vallaslin—two wings of green from cheek to cheek. Mythal. It was telling of her strength and courage, even as a girl. She shot an arrow from her bow, and it stuck into the tree beside where he stood. At this, her friends all scattered to the wind, and Sene rushed over to apologize.

“ _Ir'abelas, ha’hren_ ,” she said. “It is you again.”

Smiling, he tugged the arrow from the tree bark with ease, crouched down and returned it to her. She was like a little seed. “It is me,” he said.

He could sense the other kids, running around, whooshing and braiding in and out and up the trees and climbing the thicket, playing hide and seek. Their little brown faces peaking out at him from inside the bushes.

“When are you going to tell me who you are?” she said.

“One day.”

“That’s not good enough,” she said.

This made him laugh. 

“Are you a mage?” she said, referring to the staff he carried.

“Yes,” he said.

“You don’t have a vallaslin.”

“We have been over this. I am not Dalish, da’len.”

“Then what are you?” she said.

“I am an elf,” he said. “Not all elves are Dalish. We’ve been over that, too.”

Then, something changed. She put her little hand on his face, stared at him with eyes of grass and sky. She had never done this before. He thought maybe the touch meant that Sene—his Sene—that she was coming back to him, getting closer to waking.

“What is it?” he said.

“I am good at hunting,” she said. “Even though I’m young.”

“I know. I have seen you hunt. Very impressive.”

“I can sense things,” she said. “I know when I’m being watched or followed.”

“That’s part of what it means to be a good hunter.”

“We are not alone,” she said.

Then, the dream faded away. Or, she faded away, her touch gone with her, but the scenery remained the same. She had moved on to another place, another dream. He was alone now. Or was he? He felt it, what she felt—a presence. It was not demonic, nor was it a spirit or a Dreamer, like him. It was something else. He turned around.

He saw a child. A girl, an elf. She was three or four years old, and she wore a green dress, and she had long, red, curly hair, like Sene. But this was not Sene. The child’s eyes were gray, and she held something in her arms. Something white and still.

He knew then that it was only a death, a soul on its way out of the mortal world and passing through the Fade. “ _Ane amem_ , da’len,” he said to the child. “Do not fear me.”

But she did not seem afraid. Sometimes, the dead got lost. He wondered where she had come from. But as she stared at him, insistent, he knew then that there was something else. That she seemed to be there, distinctly, for him. He got down on one knee, held out his hand. It was an instinct. She took a few steps toward him, hesitant, but brave. The closer she got, the more familiar she felt to him. Like she belonged to him. It was strong, primal, but even then, he did not understand. When she was just out of reach, she dropped the thing she carried. It was a wolf pup, all white, and it was dead. Solas looked at it once, and then he looked at the child. He looked back to the wolf, then back to the child. Almost like looking in a mirror now. He saw. The gray eyes were his.

He awoke in the dark, panicked. Beside him, he could feel Sene, sleeping, even breaths, getting healthier, strong. Once his eyes adjusted, and her edges appeared to him, he hurriedly felt for the bow of her stomach, lifted her shirt only just and placed both hands there on the warm dip between her hip bones. He closed his eyes. He listened, searching the Fade for the thing he had just seen, sifting through the pages, emptying the years, sensing every last corner of her being, her energies. It had been his intimate knowledge of such that enabled him to sense as she grew older in the Emprise du Lion. He felt heartbeats now—hers, his. Loud and true. But those were obvious. He was trying to find the other one. The third.

He did not feel a third. He heard echoes, but they were fading fast. What he felt was absence. New. Distinct. A hole, small but unmistakable. It was red and jagged, a product of trauma, of violence. Then, it was black. Cold. Then, it was gone. He searched and he searched. But there was nothing left. Or, it was only a feeling now, inside himself, a loss. A part of him had died. The grief. Like lightning. It shocked him.

 

There was no way to know exactly how long he stayed there like that, eyes closed, sitting on his heels in the bedsheets, tilted over his sleeping lover. But when he finally opened his eyes again, the fire was dying, and the sun broke through the curtains, scattering pieces of harsh light on the stone walls and on the floor, and Sera was still there, sleeping in a mass, and it was morning. Solas, devastated, disbelieving, looked down at his hands. Dry and cracked from the bite of the Emprise du Lion. He looked at her.

There would be no protecting them, he thought. Not from this. The loss was theirs, definitive. He could not fix it. Man of power, or man of faith. He had been both, once. But now.


	10. Hallelujah

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cole helps. A reunion in the garden.

There were small, pale berries that grew on a brown trellis in her mother’s garden. They tasted good, like dill. Their leaves of cloth made it easy for Sene to fall asleep on the yellow grass. She wandered far from the woods that day. Her eyes seemed to see in new colors and schemes as if growing and growing and growing. She liked it.

She felt older the moment she came to the first mirror. It was tall and seemed alive. By the second mirror, which was overgrown with vines in the wasted evening, she knew she would never be alone, and then, by the third, she began to remember things. Violets on gray stone, eyes of a weary traveler. Mornings spent in a messy room, counting cookies and pages ripped from an old book of letters, a pretty girl with a loud voice, and sky. The air was cold now, and she wanted to go home. Wherever home was, it was only a feeling. It was not the place of berries or grassy slumber. This was good, but home was better. She knew now that she was, somehow, asleep.

She dreamed in weary mountains now. She was surfacing.

As she walked in dreams, she felt as if the world had grown to love her. She’d never felt so pure and free in dreaming, but still. Everything she touched, it touched her back as if it knew her. This was an edge she felt for some time. Everything knew her, but nothing was real. Nothing would speak. The trees were emerald sweethearts, and the skies, they watched in safety from above. She did not miss the weary traveler, because she did not know the weary traveler. He had made it so, his own design, for her. Still, there was a pain, somewhere. Deep and very old, as paths of gaining sleep and stone and dreaming. But it was not hers. It was outside and far away, traveling down an old road alone, its own. She was searching for the mirrors.

Now she felt a great, stone castle calling from a distant memory. It sang a hymn that sounded deep. Filled with ancient history, it made a mark upon her body. She searched the stairs, the rooms, the spires. From a time of patterned distance, it called. She traveled many flights, but she found only gray petals and white pieces of fur scattered to the edges, as if an animal had gone to die there and then just blew away. Finally, she found the center of everything, mirrors everywhere, but unlike before, she could never quite reach them. Every time she came close, a hand would take her own and guide her north. The hand of the traveler, she felt it. She grew to desire the hand and so would search the mirrors out on purpose just to lure his touch. The touch was warm and rough and cast in magic, but it was familiar. A yearning grew as quiet soldiers, stacked side by side in a Chantry sweet. This happened again and again as an endless cycle of new and old, want and need, until, from a far away land of loss and quiet, she heard that hymn begin to echo—

_The shepherd’s lost_

_And his home is far_

_Keep to the stars_

_The dawn will come._

She journeyed many days and nights, determined she would find him. A god of men or man of gods, it didn’t matter. She only felt the need to know the creature who had saved her. To touch the skin of the hand that pointed north, and know that he was real. For he was trying to bring her back again--back to a place of memories. When she finally came to a great, white cliff, she found a bench of iron. Stony paws that held a pot of veilfire. She sat, and it was warm, still. Snow fell like ashes, scattered to her eyes, and, with her hands folded, she waited by the monument of Fen'Harel. She knew not what it was doing there, or why she could remember only this. Of everything that she forgot, this is the thing that finds her? Tall and watching his scheme of ages, his solemn creation. She did not know who to trust. But she knew to trust her memories, and if she could wait enough years, then she could maybe crack them wide open like glyphs in the snowy wilderness. And she would know them all and speak to them in their native language, and it would be an unmistakable call of love. Somehow, she knew.

On the bench beside her now was a boy.

 _You are lost,_ said the boy. He wore a great, wide hat.

 _Do you know me?_ she said. _I am waiting for the hand that guides me. It belongs to a lonely man who I can feel. He has used it often. To hit and mold things, hard.  
_

_He waits for you. But you must find him, Inquisitor, if you want to see him again._

_Inquisitor?_

_You are healthy. You are strong. There is nothing for you here. Not anymore. All of it is just like this._

_If I leave this dream,_ she said, _will I be able to find my way back again?_

 _No,_ said the boy. _He has hidden you deep. He fears to lure you from your place of dreams. He knows that you are happy here. He would like it to stay that way, but he is grieving. He cannot see. I placed the mirrors so that you could see.  
_

_Do you know what that is doing here?_ she said, gesturing to the great, stone wolf.

 _That has always been here,_ said the boy, looking upon its fallen shadow.

_I don’t know what to do._

_You must follow the song._

_What song._

_The song of old and new. The song of faith. You, their Herald, you stand alone atop a great, silver spire. You hold their sword and you are their shield. Your throne is their voice, even if you wish it weren't. There is a place that waits for a force to hold it, he said once. The sky is falling, vhenan. Scout to the north. Be their guide. Where it’s kept, that is where you will find him. I cannot teach you. Only he can._

_Heart?_

_I am here as a comfort only,_ said the boy. _I am Compassion. I will hold your hand, but I do not know the way._

_You are Compassion?_

_His love is too bright,_ said the boy. _Without a place to put it, he burns. He cannot come here. You must return if the hurt is to heal._

_Who is he?_

_You know,_ said the boy. _He is the keeper. You are the kept. You just have to follow the song._

 _Goodbye, Compassion,_ she said.

_Dareth shiral, little flame._

She put her feet into the snow—bare now, as if a child. Alone, she journeyed. She looked out upon an ancient wasteland. The mountains were great teeth that bit and tried to hurt her. _This is familiar_ , she said, and she smiled.

Night fell. Green hand and bitter taste. A great wind from behind, like an endless stormy siege. She lost her way, but she felt no fear.

Howling to the bitter moon, now, she heard a wolf in mourning. She followed it. Shew knew its sound. An old song she’d heard before.

 

Cole came to him, soon.

“She was with child,” he said. “I heard it all before, but I did not see. I’m…sorry.”

Solas had not moved from his place on the bed beside her. He had buried his face deep in the purple covers. He held to her as if near death. 

“Please leave,” he said. 

“I can’t leave,” said Cole. “There is hurt.”

Solas lifted his head from the warm weight of the sheets. The room was pale blue and lit with morning snow, and Sera was still there, still sleeping, as a sort of hound in front of the fire. He had begun to feel the physical toll of the Emprise du Lion. Finally, it creeped, the exhaustion. As a fist behind both eyes. His muscles, his skin, all of it pulled tight and hard and heavy. He felt as chains. “Her or me?"

Cole stood beside the bed. He had his hand on her forehead. “You,” he said. “She does not hurt. It was…early. That is the word, though I don’t like that word. It is the right word. She will feel very little of this. She may never know.”

“How early.”

“I don’t—”

“How early, Cole.”

“Weeks,” said Cole, letting his hand hover over the Inquisitor’s heart. “Three at most. There is a desk and heavy breathing. Bookshelves and the crumple of a parchment note. No one understands, no one but her. Her heart beats for you alone, and you are inside of her as a boy in dreams. She is your sanctuary and your tomb. She is where your life begins and where it ends. _Hello, vhenan._ She feels protected. She knows that all of it is for her, and she may fear, but she is hopeful. A bright, hot object on the blanched winter sky. A pale wolf is made in the morning sunlight. It grows. It is a good thing. But then the blood slows, and everything is cold and cast in a red, chanting light. There is not enough to breathe, and so the flame…goes out. I heard its voice before it was gone, but it was just a spark, just an inkling, a soul within a soul, and I did not know. But I do know that _it_ did not hurt.”

“You heard it?” said Solas.

“Yes,” said Cole. “It was real. I can hear things when they are real.”

“It did not hurt? You are sure?”

“Yes. You are the one who hurts, Solas. I am here for you. You have let me in before. You can let me help you.”

“No,” said Solas. He put his head back down to the covers, breathed the smell of them. Her sweat and the deep green of elfroot. “Please, Cole,” he said, breaking now. “Whatever you saw, or heard, you cannot tell anyone.”

“If the child had been born,” said Cole, “she would have had red hair. Like the Inquisitor. Like Sene. Curly, red, freckled, bright. Fast and good and real.”

Something caught deep in Solas’s chest. Like a fishhook. He saw the child from the Fade, how he had reached out for her. How she had walked toward him. Pressed beneath the weight of an immense failure then, he could not breathe. “Please leave,” he said.

“I will never tell, Solas,” Cole went on. “It is not my place to tell, but you could let me care for her. Just for a little while. _She_ is alive. She is not barren. She is young and breathes strong. You are hurting, not her. Prideful, angry, sad. Old mistakes, painted pictures on the wall of the bound and broken. You are starved and thirsty and angry at a world that no one else understands. You are flesh, and yet, you are not. It is very confusing. Still you need rest, like all men. You eat. You drink water and get cold with a winter’s chill. I can keep her hidden, like you can. I can make her safe.”

“What if she wakes. What then."

“I will comfort her. I can hold her hand. She does not blame you, and she will not be angry. I am not—I know I am not you. But I am me. I do love her. Not as you love her, but nobody can do that. I have tried to understand, but it is too big. Too old. Like trying to watch a dying star giving birth to a brand new world.”

“What does that mean, Cole?”

“How you love her,” said Cole, shifting his presence. He closed his eyes and tilted his head so that his gaze disappeared beneath the enormous brim of his black hat. Solas could feel him now, the sifting, the comforting whole of Compassion. He had very little strength to fight Cole that morning. Cole sensed this. He left the Inquisitor’s side and came to sit at the end of the bed, his pale hands folded in his lap, his face still hidden. Solas could hear it now, the crackling of a dying fire.

“It fills you like warm light,” said Cole. “It scares you. You are scared. I didn’t know _you_ could be scared, Solas.”

“There are many things you do not know about me, Cole.”

“You were a father,” said Cole, “That scares you, too. Because you did not know you could be. Your grief and your guilt, they combine to form a fog that overwhelms the village. Nobody can see, and there are demons waiting in the wings. But the people need you. I know it is the Inquisitor they love as their own, but there are people who need you. Like Sera. Sera is pink and unbound, and she is fearful, as a little girl in braids. She hides inside of thorny bushes, and she needs your strength to break free. _Sene needs you to breathe_. But you are Solas. You are Pride, held deep. That is—that is outside of the things I can feel. But the Inquisitor heals as you bleed. _Isene. Avise'ain._ She bled too much before, and that is what made the hole. And while that is not a loss you could have prevented, she is not dead. The Inquisitor lives on. You saved her.”

“Tell me what to do,” said Solas. “If you're not going to leave, then tell me. Give me something.”

“Tell _you_ what to do?”

"Anything,” said Solas, stern, shaking his head out like some sort of animal. He couldn't take it anymore. “Do it. Just do it.”

“Go to the garden,” said Cole, his voice deeper now, and serious. He stood from the bed as a specter. “Wake Sera. Show her that things can be green again. She likes things to be shiny and green. She likes muffins and soup, too. I will stay with the Inquisitor. I will hold her hand. I will keep her hidden, far from the nightmare’s teeth, and if she shows herself, I will bring her to the place where she can find you again.”

Solas gave in after that. He pulled back to his knees and pried himself from the familiar, her body. The deeper he hid her, the farther away she got. And yet he could not bring himself to disturb her. He had lost control, had punished himself into a painful drought. An oblivion. A fool now, he felt deserving of whatever terrible fate befell him in the years to come. In all of his weakness, he obliged Compassion.

“Thank you,” he said, digging the heels of his palms into his eyeballs.

“You are welcome, Solas,” said Cole. “You are always welcome here.”

 

She awoke to a mostly empty room. Sun, bright. Harsh lines and glass shapes in the walls like light breaking free from a cavern. But Cole was there, sitting in a chair by the side of the bed, holding her hand inside his own. His was warm. Hers felt heavy, as a fish wrapped in parchment. When he saw her there, he was happy. He smiled.

“Inquisitor,” he said. "You followed the song."

“What happened?” she said. She looked around. “How did I get here?”

“Solas,” said Cole.

Instinctively, she sat up fast. She felt around in the sheets as if she’d lost something very important. “Where’d it go?” she said. Her limbs felt strangely long, detached from her body and folded into funny shapes on the bed.

“Where did what go?”

“I—” she touched a hand to her mouth. The feeling, whatever it was, it was strong, but it seemed to have come from the Fade. It was already growing quiet, as a candle in a winter storm. “I don’t know,” she said.

"Are you feeling all right?” said Cole. “Everyone has been very worried.”

Sene looked at her hands, her knees, her ankles. Then she looked at Cole. She was thirsty. “Yes,” she said. She felt for her back then. Something was off, but even though it was stiff and foreign feeling, it did not hurt. She remembered some of it. “Something tried to kill me,” she said.

Cole rose from his seat, took the pretty, yellow jacket that hung from the back of the chair. He handed it to her. “Many things have tried to kill you, Inquisitor.”

“This was different,” said Sene, placing it around her shoulders, shifting her arms into the sleeves. “It almost succeeded.”

“I’m sure that Solas would very much like to hold you again, Inquisitor,” said Cole. “I sent him away so that I could find you. He is hurting very badly.”

“Solas,” said Sene, just to taste the name, feel it on her tongue as a bead. _Solas._ He was hers. He belonged to her. Had she forgotten him somehow? In dreaming, yes. Only just. All that was fading now. As he had always been there, just a kind, gray sleeping flower in winter, tilted over like a bell, holding out his hand. She missed him. “Where is he?”

“He is in the garden,” said Cole. “He is there with Sera. They are praying alone but sitting together. They are at a square, marble table. So is the Iron Bull.”

Sene got up very quickly then, lost her balance. Her head felt empty and heavy all at once. She was nauseous. She nearly fainted, but Cole caught her in time. Her red hair spilled over his shoulder as a nest. She buried her face there. He smelled…good. Of rosemary and cotton sheets and that smell that comes when you blow out a candle in a cold room.

“You should not move so quickly, Inquisitor,” said Cole. “You are healed, but you are still not whole _._ You must rest.”

“Please,” she said, holding her forehead in her hand.

"Would you like me to take you to him?”

“Yes, please.”

He smoothed her hair, a loving touch, and held her firmly against him. “Good. We will go slowly,” he said. “Solas told me that if you woke, you would be very weak. Like the stem of a very long flower, or maybe a sapling? He was thinking of a sapling when he told me, but that could have been something else. Solas is very confusing.”

“I’m not a sapling,” she said. “I’ve just been—I don’t know exactly what happened. But I’m fine. I’ll be all right.”

“Lean,” he said.

So she did. She leaned. It was hard for her to lean, but Cole had a way of making things easy. Like warm, soft bread. The rising dough. He was a pleasant sleepy thing of sadness. But such wisdom. It took them a long time to get down the stairs, but once they got to the bottom, Cole opened the door and told her to take a deep breath. “All of them will know,” he warned. “They will be watching. They will be so happy to see you again. Some of them will bow or kneel, and it will be awkward for you.”

“I don’t care,” she said. "They deserve to know I'm all right."

“You are a good person,” said Cole. “I’m glad you did not die.”

This almost made her laugh, but she was weak. She could not seem to catch her breath. Her lungs felt perpetually emptied, inside out, somehow pinned to her throat. Her whole body seemed to be folding in on itself, one piece after another, and her muscles were raw and stiff, her angles sharp, and her head felt like it was wrapped in a warm gauze and dense as clay.

“Do I look okay?” she said, suddenly very concerned. The concern itself embarrassed her, but still. She felt for her hair. It felt all piled into curls, peeling off the back of her neck. She was sweaty from the stairs and she smelled of elfroot. The yellow jacket that she wore had been sewn by Sera, and it had little pink nugs embroidered in the collar. Otherwise, she wore only a simple white shirt and gray pants. She was barefoot.

“You look like you,” said Cole. “That is how he wants you. They will see the Herald. He will see the flame. The apple. _Sal vun’in. Sal era’vun. Sathan._ ”

“ _Sal vun’in,_ ” she repeated. _“Sal era’vun._ Another day. Another night. Why?”

“It is what he thinks,” said Cole. “It is what he said.”

“When?”

“When he saved your life, Inquisitor.”

 

In the garden, Solas was on his hands and knees, little vines and red flowers creeping to his wrists and ankles. The Iron Bull was there beside him, his great hand on Solas’s back. Solas had lost his breakfast in the grass. Everything he tried to keep down, it came right back up again. Even the water. He seemed to be ripped from purpose and all function.

“Solas,” said Bull. “Are you okay, buddy?”

Solas fell back onto his heels, wiped his mouth on his sleeve. Then he hung his head and breathed. He covered his face with his long hands and shook his head over and over. “No,” he said.

“Come on,” said Bull. “I got you.” He picked Solas up from the ground easily, placed him back on his feet. “You’re light for such a crazy motherfucker.”

“Thank you, Bull,” he said as they made their way back to the table. 

The garden was mostly empty, quiet. It was early, and most of the servants and the rest of the civilians and soldiers and mages had been kept away. He did not wish for an audience, and this seemed to be well-known and prepared for. Even still, the Chantry sisters walked freely, as did members of the Inquisition who knew the Inquisitor well. Dorian was leaning against the well, waiting for the Iron Bull. Solas was not sure, but he had begun to detect a spark between them. He had missed Skyhold. The greenery and the ache of ancient nature. So many falling in love, in sex, in pain. It was a gift and a loss. Sera waited back at the table, alone, her eyebrows way up on her forehead. She was concerned and pink-cheeked and holding a yellow handkerchief she’d dampened in a glass of water. “Something cool, yeah?” she said to Solas. “I used to—I knew this old woman who was mean but she would put damp rags on my wrists when I got sick. Stupid, but it worked.”

Solas smiled at her. He nodded, and though this seemed to surprise her, she did not hesitate to take one of his hands in hers and press the handkerchief to the inside of the wrist. He closed his eyes. It was cool. It felt very good, he decided. A small, human comfort that he would not forget. He leaned against the table then, heavy. He did not much feel like sitting.

“Hey,” said Bull, sitting down at the table across from Sera. “Solas. I’ve been meaning to ask you something. It’s about what you did to that Shadow that hurt the Boss. Turned him to a fucking block of ice. Shattered his fucking head with your bare fucking hands.”

“Hey, Bull,” said Sera, protective. “Not now, right?”

But to Solas, it was an odd comfort, reminding him of desperation and war torn sadness and yet, one of the deepest bonds he’d ever known. “It’s all right Sera,” he said. “My reaction was was personal, Bull. I did not enjoy it.”

“Well maybe you should take things personally a little more often. That was seriously fucking badass.”

“I have not taken anything personally in quite some time. Let us hope that I must never take anything that personally again.”

The Iron Bull stopped to consider this. His great, iron brow softened, took on a great, iron sadness. But always braced, always on guard. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. You’re right, Solas.”

"As usual.”

“Are you joking with me, apostate?”

"I am trying, tal-vashoth. I am trying.”

The world was all a dream then. In his lack of sleeping, he’d lost track of his footing in the Fade. He would find himself there, indiscriminately now. Then he would surface with his cheek pressed firmly to the floor or the grass or the Iron Bull’s stone shoulder. There was a great hush then, fallen all across the garden. The flowers shivering, a lonely but mighty breeze. The world, Solas noticed, had grown still. He looked around. It was wonderful to sleep and to be held by the arms of evening.

“Thank the Maker,” said a Chantry sister. She was carrying a loaf of bread back from the kitchens. The bread smelled of lavender and smoke.

 _Thank the Maker._ More voices now, as fireflies on a blue field of corn. He thought he could hear the rustlings as people fell to their knees.

“Solas,” said Sera. “Solas.”

She was shaking him by the shoulders, hard. Had he gone unconscious? He didn’t know. But when he came to, he saw the thing they all saw, the tall creature of red, standing there, alone with one arm folded, one arm straight. She was embarrassed, but fierce. Her freckles high on her cheeks, as they got when she was tired, careful, hungry. She was worried. She was confused and emerging from a slumber so deep, only gods understood. She was staring right at him with green eyes he had not truly seen since the Emprise du Lion.

In mere strides, he made his way to her body in the garden. He held her head in his hands, her face to his, eyes closed, breathing all the way from the very depths of his being. She held to his wrists, clutched hard. Very hard. The strength of her, it made him hopeful, and the hope made him unhinged with a rush of relief. Tears bit. He tried to blink them back but it was useless. The apple and the living flame. The hair all messy, stuck in his hands as he combed through the tangles, pressed them to the sides of her face. The tip of each ear, how it slanted and fell. He looked at her now, searched her eyes for all of it, everything, for the nights and days she’d spent without him. But she remembered nothing, as was his design. His expression must have scared her. She said his name, and she started to cry, frantic, clutching to his face, and she kissed him, but the weight of their reunion brought them both to their knees. He held her to his chest, listened to her beating heart, waited, closed his eyes to the prying sun.

There were no words for them. No Elvhen, no nothing. Just _there_. A treasure for another tale told by firelight in the ages to come. The Skyhold garden sang of glowing feats of love and silent mourning. Some would cry looking upon them, and many would kneel or simply watch, gracious. But the weather was clear, and the morning, the morning was fine. That two tall elves might find love amidst the landscape of war is not so unusual, is it? Well, maybe. Shh. Please don't tell them the truth.

Not yet.

A small, good thing, remember.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! -g


	11. Far Gone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Comfort. A magical visitor.

“It’s snowing,” she said. "Look."

“We never celebrated your birthday, vhenan.”

“It's snowing. I don’t care about that.”

The room was dim, and it was evening. He slicked her hair into a long, red fin down her pale back, twisted it, and put it over her shoulder. They were in the bath. It was just a great, silver basin filled with warm water, set in her quarters by the fire. She sat in front of him, facing away, hugging her freckled knees to her chest. His knees were on either side of her, and she’d rest her head on one or the other whenever she became dreamy.

“It is snowing,” he said, “and you don’t care about birthdays. Did it snow on the day you were born?”

“How would I know?” she said.

“You could guess.”

“When were you born?” she said.

“It did not snow on the day I was born."

He ran a washcloth from the top of her neck down the length of her spine. It was a focused, deliberate movement. The wound in her back had healed, but there was a mark there, like cracked ceramic just below her rib cage. It would become a considerable scar. He brought his fingers across it, a small but jagged ridge. She felt no pain unless he pressed. They’d been testing it, every morning and night for the past week. It was always getting better. The skin had healed tough, though it was new.

“Where I was born," she said, "most of the other kids were boys, and they were all born after me. I was older and a girl.”

“And you were better,” he said. “They envied you for it.”

“Yes, they did."

She listened then, to sound of their movements in the water, the dripping from the wash cloth. He traced it beneath her chin, down the front of her neck. She moved with him, reading his every touch. He cleaned behind her ears and let the warm water drizzle down the top of her back. She had her eyes closed.

"Would you like a birthday party, vhenan?"

"A party?"

“We can do whatever you want. Snow or shine.”

“I don't want a party,” she said. “But I do think the Inquisition should do something.”

“Like what?”

“A show of strength. Camaraderie, something like that. Support. Since the Winter Palace, and everything that happened in the Emprise du Lion, things have felt far too insular here. I need to get out.”

“I agree,” said Solas.

“You do?”

“Yes. As you said, we’ve not had any real, social contact with either our allies or followers since the Winter Palace, and even that was infested with strangers. I think a gesture of some sort could certainly provide a boost to morale.”

“Are you worried about morale?” she said.

“No,” he said. “But it’s not a bad idea to head things off at the pass. We have learned much about what could lie ahead in the Arbor Wilds. Gathering a small representation of camaraderie in front of our allies would illustrate a kind of grace and good will on the part of the Inquisition. Perhaps a tour of the villages in Ferelden and Orlais. The ones you’ve liberated, fixed, or saved. A show of continued support to our people. It also would not hurt to parade you around a little bit, looking hale and strong. Set you upon a great, white steed. Make you _look_ like the Inquisitor.”

“A great, white steed?”

He smirked. "I prefer white," he said. "But you can get whatever color you want, vhenan."

“I guess you’re right,” she said. “Not about the steed, but about everything else.”

“What’s the matter?”

“A tour of the villages of southern Thedas? That could take weeks.”

“It will not take weeks. And this is part of your duty. I will be there, by your side, the entire time.”

“All right then,” she said. “I’ll talk to Cullen about the details first thing in the morning.”

“Very good,” said Solas.

He touched the washcloth to the back of her ear. He pressed. He pressed it all down her neck, the length of her right arm, to the wrist bones. Then, he went to her left ear and started over again. He could feel her give a little bit, flutter beneath his hand as he did this, change. She turned around to face him, weightless in the water. She placed one hand on each of his freckled shoulders. He put a piece of wet hair behind her ear, ran his thumb over a smudge on her cheek. Then, he smiled.

“You look better, vhenan,” he said. “You look good.”

“Just _good_ ”

He smiled.

“Humor me,” she said, earnest. “Just once.”

He felt unraveled now, had to collect himself, looking down at her, the beauty, the wide green eyes and high, wet cheekbones, the freckles glistening and accented by the water from the bath. “You are a beautiful woman,” he said. “You know that.”

“I feel weird.”

“Weird? What for?”

“After—everything. I feel pale. I've lost weight. I feel like my knees are knobbier than they were before.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. He cupped one hand to her knee, studied it. He did the same to the other. “Your knees have always been this knobby.”

This made her laugh. He felt a familiar pull then as she leaned forward and kissed him. With her hands on his cheeks, she tucked both of her knobby knees beneath her. He leaned into it at first, unable to stop himself, taking her into into his arms, holding her, hard. The kiss deepened, as he felt along the lines of her bare back and she moved her hands to the back of his neck. Everything was slippery and warm, easy, but mounting, becoming urgent, a kind of gnawing desperation. It had been a long time since their sex beneath the elven glyph.

But Solas stopped them. It took a great deal of willpower. She was surprised, ripped from the moment as he lightly picked her up by the arms and set her back, away from him in the tub. Looking down into the water now, he still held to her hard with both hands. He wanted her. But the ridge in her skin, the injury still troubled him.

“Why not?” she said, seeming to read his mind. She picked up his great face with her hands and looked him in the eye.

He shook his head. “It is too soon, vhenan.”

“I feel okay,” she said. “It's been over a week. We can be soft.” She smiled so sweetly, so earnestly, a comfort to him, and she kissed him again, bit lightly into his lower lip. She held him softly underneath the water. She could make it so painful, so fast.

He took her wrist before she got too far. He leaned forward to speak into the side of her neck. “Soon,” he said. 

“When?”

“When you are completely healed.”

“I miss you, Solas,” she said.

“I miss you, too, Sene," he said. "I do.”

With this, their rush of emotion, Sene gave up, and the tension lessened between them. She huddled into his arms. They sat with their foreheads touching.

“Can you show me something then?" she said after a while. "Before we get out?”

This made him smile, and he kissed her on the forehead. It had been a long time since she’d asked him this. “That, I can do,” he said. “Turn around.”

She turned around again, weightless, in the tub. He eased her toward him so that she sat with her back pressed against him. The water splashed over the sides of the basin and onto the floor. He reached both arms around in front of her and gathered her hands into his. With his head over her shoulder, he rested his cheek to hers.

“Close your eyes,” he said.

So she did. He did as well. He closed his hands around hers, and he called to the Fade, to the familiar, to the provider of the missing piece. When he opened his eyes again, he felt the familiar humming in his fingertips, and he opened her hands.

“Open,” he said.

There, dancing in her palms, was the same green butterfly he’d conjured in the Emprise du Lion. It was lively. It played to the tips of her eyelashes, landed on her cheek. She laughed. He coaxed it to the back of his hand where it perched, a small treasure, on his knuckles.

“It’s a butterfly,” she said.

“It is a spirit,” he said.

She touched its body then with just the tip of her finger. “This is a spirit?”

“A spirit’s appearance can take on many forms. How we perceive a spirit is based on our own thoughts and feelings.”

“Based on _your_ thoughts and feelings.”

“In this particular instance, yes.”

“So, why a butterfly?” she said. "Just because you like them?"

“The butterflies are just a token from my childhood,” said Solas. He set it into her palm. Its wings opened and closed, but it seemed to be looking right at her. "A memory."

“Why did you conjure this spirit, Solas?” she said. “What’s it doing here?”

“I believe it is saying hello.”

“To us?”

“To you,” he said. “This is the spirit that saved your life.”

She straightened then, rising toward the butterfly. She held it not an inch from her face. “This saved me?” she said. “It’s so small.”

“Sometimes,” said Solas, “it is the smallest creatures, those that appear to have the least amount of power, that end up saviors in the end. Like you.”

She turned to look at him. “I’m not a savior,” she said.

“Perhaps not," he said. He directed her attention back to the spirit. “But you are _something_. You have freed slaves, saved whole villages from ruin. Some would say that makes you a savior.”

"Some would say."

He waved his hand over the butterfly once then, and it faded away.

For a moment, Sene was very still. Then, finally, she said, “That was special, Solas." She had become serious, loving. “ _Enaste_."

“ _Ara enaste,_ vhenan.”

He held her to his chest. They sat in the bath by the orange light of the fire until the water was too lukewarm to continue. Then, they got out and toweled off, put on white clothes and wrapped themselves all in robes and blankets. Sene’s hair was wet, but she wanted to go out to the balcony anyway, to watch the snow. Though he did not want her to catch a chill, he felt bad about rejecting her, and about how cooped up she'd been, trying to heal, for a week, and so he tugged a big blanket over her head like a cowl and held her tight.

They leaned against the railing. The night was long, dark, and metal. Freezing cold and gleaming. The snow fell in tiny little shapeless flakes all around them. She held out her hand to catch them. This would not be the fun stuff, the kind you can pack and play with. It would only be dust, blowing around on the bitter wind and playing to the grass like sand. They went back inside. Solas pulled the doors closed and drew the curtains. He stoked the fire. She sat down on the couch, curled into a corner. He came and sat down beside her. He put both arms around her, and there, they just sort of molded into one another, and were quiet. They stayed like that for a long time, until Sene fell asleep. She seemed so innocent as she healed there, though he knew that this was false. She was not innocent, and she was not weak. It was just—he could not make out her strength yet. Could not define it. Only that it was hers and hers alone. Solas wanted to fall asleep with her there on the couch, but he still had trouble. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw something that disturbed him, and he had to open them back up again—the red lyrium, the blood, the poultice, the Fade. Having her there, however, was a comfort, and he tried to remind himself of this, that he did not have to protect her here, that he did not have to save her. He picked her up and carried her to the bed. Her body was long but she was light in his arms. He lie beside her, propped up on a pillow, trying to read for a while by the light of one candle, but to be honest, he couldn't make out the words, so when he finally gave up, he blew out the candle and curled his body around hers beneath the covers, pressing his nose to the back of her neck. “Goodnight, Sene,” he whispered. And eventually, he drifted. He was far gone.


	12. Hunt Well

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Solas continues to struggle with what happened, Sene, newly healed, is determined to prove to him that she is just as strong as she's ever been. Along with Dorian and Sera, they make their way from village to village, tending, greeting. The Iron Bull meets them in Crestwood with an interesting plan to get the Inquisitor back on her feet again.
> 
>  

Solas wanted to hold off on Sahrnia. He blamed it on the heavy rebuilding, and the snow, but Sene knew that it was more than that. They started by traveling to Redcliffe Village, a familiar, wooded place of grass and bugs that had begun to bustle and whip in its new state of restoration. Sene, Solas, Sera, and Dorian spent several days there, visiting with the elders at the Gull and Lantern, greeting Chantry sisters, and seeing that the merchants and healers had enough supplies to keep the villagers as renewed as the town itself. They then traveled to the Crossroads refugee camp where Sene aided the local hunters as a way of stretching her muscles and getting back into the business of violence. They also ripped out a few leftover bandit installations as well. Dagna had crafted her a new bow, a composite of wood and bloodstone, a menacing creature of forest and smith. Despite her injury, Sene felt no pain, no fear or hesitation. She felt strong. She had never been a frightened kind of person. She hated to dwell on missing pieces and the past, even as a girl. In fact, she’d never _ever_ been distilled, ever removed from the bright colors of speed and constant noise of living and searching until she met Solas. The stillness about him, this brutally elegant man who made her wait and sit and watch things. Count the legs on every insect, feel the grain of the paper pages on your skin. Feel the Veil, the million threads of it humming, invisible, at the tips of your eyelashes, and as you skin the animal you intend to eat, fold your hands through the last, great sighing of its fur and feel its sacrifice one final time.

She had never known a man like him. She had never known a _man,_ but somehow, she knew that he was nothing of the Dalish boys from the Free Marches, or their older brothers or even their fathers, all of whom were graceful and strong, but who were also claimed by unearned arrogance, who hated things and people and wore their persecution like a badge of pride. They stomped around the grass in fear and loathing, demanding and filled with envy and shooting their arrows into the hides of great, brute creatures just so they could carry them home and boast, and brag, and drink by the fire. Even her father, who she loved for his colorful mind of invention, and who, at times, she missed with a brand of reckless desperation, had been a man of carefully cultivated insularity. For as much as he loved her, and for as much as he loved stories, he did not like her wandering into the human settlements, and he would not listen to her stories—not of the blacksmiths or the women who dressed as birds, not of the merchants and their funny hats or of the little city girls who would ask her to play with them in the leaves, even though they all knew the marks on her face, but they still asked her anyway, and she was always grateful. The farming, hunting, drinking men of Clan Lavellan had provided for her a stifling, regimented existence, and she knew that she would never again call it her home.

Solas, on the other hand—he moved inside the world the same way he moved inside of her—attentive, assured, delicate when the occasion demanded, but he could growl, and there were terrifying depths to Solas and his imperious air, and he demanded, not a savior or a submissive, but an equal to keep him sane. He took what he wanted, and the rest, he left to wilt or to wait, and she didn’t know what it was, but deep at his center, she sensed a kind of holy darkness that served both to drain him and to make him glow. It clawed through a history and a legacy, for blood and now, for her, and then it went straight down, through to the center of the earth that cradled their tangled, messy bodies every single night, and had since they first fell in love. He was tall and a strong tree that shaded her, and she could climb it when she wanted, and he would let her, completely, on her own, and if she needed help, he would hold her up with his branches, and this would bring her closer to the sky, to the gods, to the end of time, and then, when she had gotten all she needed from way up high, he would bring her down low, slowly, always so slow, and he’d take her hair in red handfuls, and he’d breathe her in, the whole way, make her feel all skin and wet and smells, bothered and joyful, and as he did this, he’d demand such purpose from and for her body, mold it as if it were his own invention, every freckle, every sigh, make her feel good, make her feel whole and real. Then, just as easily as he took, Solas always gave in return. He’d yield his own body, as fireflies in darkness, to her.

She could tell from the way others reacted to him, to her, to the two of them together, that none were quite sure of how they had, not just found, but tamed one another. She often looked at him and wondered the same thing—how he was older than her, this wandering, powerful mage and a Dreamer and such a blue, blue mystery, and yet somehow, she had made him hers. She knew how grateful he was. It was as if he’d never before known this kind of love. Mind, spirit, and flesh, and yet, she sensed a wisdom, about women. About love.

But lately, things were different. While they were in the Hinterlands, Solas had begun waking up earlier than her every morning, and she would find him, later, stretched out on the muddy shore of the lake, eyes closed to the sun, waiting. At night, he wanted to sketch. Charcoal on paper—her, the moon, fires, red wolves and long trees that stretched into the sea. His eyes their cool and violet gray, sometimes bloodshot in their focus as he drew her. When it got too late, she would fall asleep, and he would not, firm beside her, she could feel, sense, hear him—the sound of the charcoal or the pages of a book as they turned. Sometimes, she would wake in the middle of the night, and he would be there, passed out beside her, hardened into sleep as a stone. But this was rare. Solas was not sleeping well. Some nights, he was not sleeping at all. This, out of everything that had happened since they'd found each other—the Breach, the mark, Corypheus—was, oddly, the one thing that worried her most. She loved Solas. She knew his heart. Solas was a Dreamer, and sleep was his playground, his altar. She tried to ask him what was going on, but he wouldn’t worry her. She knew, however, that it was because of her. Everything changed after the Emprise du Lion. Those few nights he’d spent, cold and wanting, slaving to mend her body and to protect her from her own pain, they had drained something from him, something essential. He was perpetually exhausted and deeply, deeply watchful. Always with a hand on her if he could. Protective, without fail, as they fought bandits and wildlife in the Hinterlands. He stood by. Yet, even as she felt completely healed, they still had not sexed in the wake of her injury. It was another of his fears. She wanted so hard to bring him back. She didn’t know where to begin. She missed his body and his dreaming. All she could think to do was show him that she was still her, that she was still alive, that she was as strong and red as she had ever been. Before Suledin Keep. His little flame.

 

It was barely a day’s ride to Crestwood. They’d met Iron Bull right on the edge of the village, and he had word of a High Dragon roosting in the area. It had been picking off the livestock and killed a few Inquisition guards. He wanted to hunt it and to make it his bitch. Those were his exact words.

“We take the dragon, tonight. And then we parade to Caer Bronach. We drink, and we be merry as fuck,” said the Iron Bull. “We will visit the village tomorrow, and by then, news of the Inquisitor’s return will have stormed its way through southern Thedas. This is my plan.” He was quite serious.

They were all on horseback, facing away from the village—Sene, Solas, Sera, Dorian, the Iron Bull, Cullen, and, not far behind them, an Inquisition guard about a hundred deep. This part of Crestwood was almost too sunny now, a yellow hell since they’d drained the lake and closed the rift many months before. Sene had to shield her eyes to see anything. Cullen wanted them to keep moving for the Inquisitor’s safety, though Sera kept reassuring him they were on high ground.

“There’s no vantage point, yeah?” said Sera. “And anyway, Solas has got his hawk eyes at the ready. _Staring_.”

“My what?” said Solas.

“You know what I’m talking about. Always watching, brooding. Nothing getting by you for a while, that’s for sure.”

“I can’t tell if you’re complimenting me,” he said. “But I suppose that’s mostly typical at this point.”

“Solas,” said Sene.

“Yes, Inquisitor.” He sounded very tired, but he smiled, squinting against the day, in her direction.

“ _Yes, Inquisitor_ ,” said Sera. “Like the undead. When’s the last time you slept, Solas? You look all…ishy.”

“Sera, please,” said Sene. “Solas, what do you think of this?”

“Of what?”

“Of Bull’s plan.”

“The dragon.”

“Yes,” she said.

His eyes hardened to her. He looked down, and he sighed, and then he looked away, behind them somewhere, in the distance, past the small army and into the sun. He did not want this. She knew it, immediately, and her heart sank, and then, she could feel herself growing angry with him. The feeling was new, creeping. It startled her. She put her horse right up beside his then—hers a white steed, just as he’d suggested. She decided she liked the color. His was black and tall and course as vines. She could feel the rest of them looking away as she took his face into her hand, lightly, made him look at her, carving out a private moment between them. She wanted to understand, but she needed him to talk to her. His look was despairing when she found his eyes, but it was not disapproving.

“Solas?” she said.

“This will be a great trial,” he said, removing her hand from his face, kissing it once, then holding it inside his own, swarming her with his familiar focus. “Do you feel that you are ready, Sene?” When he said her name like that, and he just gave himself over, she lost her anger. Immediately, she felt healed. She felt like her. If he’d had any reservations beyond the personal, the irrational—love fears, that is how she knew them—he would have argued with her, taken her aside and made her see. But she knew that he knew what was truly at stake here. Everyone else knew as well. If there was to be any hope for them at all, the Inquisitor needed to slay that dragon. She needed a win, and a big one, and fast.

“I’m ready,” she said.

“Then I agree,” said Solas.

“All _right_ ,” said the Iron Bull, cracking their moment wide open with his eavesdropping. “Boss, it’s time for your revenge.”

“My revenge?” she said. “On a dragon?”

“Well, something like that. More of a generic vengeance, I suppose.”

“Pft, good one,” said Sera.

“I, for one, thought it was hilarious,” said Dorian. His horse was gray and wore a wide, green leather sash.

“Yeah, you would,” said Sera. “Feathers, you are.”

“Feathers? And what is that supposed to mean?”

She laughed then for what felt like a very long time. Solas sighed so hard, Sene thought he might turn inside out.

“If we are to take down this dragon, then we must prepare,” said Sene, straightening. “I won’t ride in blind.”

“If I may,” said Solas.

“Of course. Give me what you’ve got.”

“Time is of the essence,” he said. “We should go, now. And I would suggest, in addition to the Iron Bull, taking only Dorian and myself. With any more than four in our party, we'll be asking for casualties. We have a need for magical attacks, and we cannot afford to put too many in close quarters with a dragon. This means that I think it could be dangerous for you, Sera.”

“Get off?” she said.

“With three at range we can successfully flank the beast. Also, one of us can see to Sene’s barrier the entire time.”

“Pft. Googly eyes. You and your _barrier_ nonsense.”

With this, Solas seemed to lose his grip. His horse sensed it, shifted beneath him, stomped a little and he had to calm her with a firm hand. “Sera,” he said after that—stern, loud. She got small, she almost disappeared. “You know better than anyone, save perhaps myself, that Sene almost died at Suledin Keep. She is the Inquisitor, the bearer of the mark, and the only hope we have of stopping Corypheus. And while I agree that this is an important fight for her, and I of course acknowledge my personal stake in her survival, I also know that we— _we—_ must protect her. She is our charge as much as she is our leader. Sera, you, of all people should understand.”

Sera looked down at her hands, away, sad eyes of blue. Sene thought she might cry and felt the need to reach out to her, but she also knew that Solas was right.

“Me of all people, huh?” said Sera.

“As her best friend,” said Solas. “Listen to me, Sera. Don’t kid. Not about this. When we get back to Skyhold, then you can punish me. Put all the lizards in my bed you want, but until then, please. We must focus on Sene. We mustn’t take unnecessary risks. Ranged magical attacks are the best way to defeat a High Dragon while simultaneously keeping our defenses high.”

“Right, right,” said Sera, coming around. “I get it. I agree…Sol _-arse._ Just get your breaches untied.”

He laughed at this, sounding almost unhinged, sounding relieved. “I’m glad.”

“But don’t think it’ll just be lizards like last time,” she said. “Because you’re never _in_ your bed in Skyhold, are you? No, no. It will be something much…weirder than lizards. And it won't be your bed.”

“Do your weirdest,” said Solas.

“I’ll alert the village of Crestwood,” said Cullen, shifting atop his horse—she was brown and fierce. He looked overheated in his armors. It was a rather awkward moment for him. “Since it will be nightfall soon, the four of you should just head back to Caer Bronach once the dragon is vanquished.”

“That sounds good, Commander,” said Sene. “Thank you.”

He smiled, nodded, but he would not meet her eyes. “We’ll meet you back at the fort and conduct our duty in the village first thing tomorrow morning. Sera, you should come with me now. The villagers will like meeting a member of the Inquisitor’s inner circle.”

“Right,” said Sera. “Off to do my duty. A dragon needs _mages_. I get it. The Tevinter looks like he could use some action anyway. _If ya know wudduh mean.”_

“My word,” said Dorian. “Aren’t we feisty today?”

"Just today?” said Solas, scratching his head.

Sene dismounted her horse then, quickly, and Sera, reading the gesture as something important, did the same. The two walked over to the edge of a grassy cliff and hugged, hard, in the yellow sun. Sera smelled of sweat and earth and rose petals. Sene could almost feel her ribs cracking inside the embrace as Sera lifted her clean off the ground. But it was just fine, as she felt no pain anymore, none from the place she’d been stuck by that Shadow. That stupid fucking Shadow.

“Be careful, right?” said Sera, cupping her hands to Sene’s bright red head.

“I will,” said Sene.

“I’m not joking. That thing summons its babies, you watch your flanks.”

“I will.”

“And tell your boyfriend I’m not kidding about the…weird thing. It will be weirder than lizards.”

“I’m certain he knows by now that you’re not kidding, but I’ll tell him anyway.”

“Good then,” said Sera. “And however you say _I love you_ in Elfy, put it straight up your arse and leave it there, for Solas. _I love you._ Common language. Common people. Good people. You and me. I have your back, Quiz. You know that.”

“I know that,” said Sene. “And I love you, too. _Not_ in Elfy.”

“Good. Now hurry up, yeah? And don’t think I’ll be letting you go off with the _elven man_ all night long. Noway. I want a party when you get back. A real one. With bows in our hair. With singing. And bells. There have to be bells, all right?”

“You’ll get your party,” said Sene, hard now, and mighty, and big and untamed as her blood turned hot. “And your bows. And your singing. And your bells. Count on it, Sera. I’ll be home soon.”

 

And of course, she was.

The dragon was big. Real big. Not since Haven had she been so close to anything that massive and raw and unrelenting in its wishes to kill her. This dragon breathed electricity, which made the dried grasses around them catch fire. But still, the fight went more quickly than any of them had expected. They were well-prepared for this. Sene tried to play it conservative, but her speed and intuition took bright hold in the end, and she very soon lost her restraint. She felt mean and sharp like a fox with its teeth in something warm, though she always managed to stay at a safe distance to avoid being caught in a maelstrom she could not escape. She felt worried at times that Solas would try and tend to her a little bit too specifically, but he did not. He did well. In fact, it was he who struck the final blow, who brought the dragon to its scaled and leathery knees with one final blast of magical willpower, and when it was finished, the Iron Bull lifted the exhausted elf high up over his head, and paraded him around the great dead beast in unfettered celebration. She watched her lover laugh as he did this, and it broke her heart and healed it soundly, all at once. She wiped the sweat out of her eyes and crouched down to rest and to smile and collect her relief. Though she was nearly full form, she knew it would take a week or so to get back her endurance. Dorian was there now, crouched beside her. Somehow, he always smelled good. The heady smell of a man but also as mint, or lavender. Something herbal like that, though she couldn’t place it exactly. He put a large, rough hand on the back of her neck and smiled.

“All Thedas will be ripe with news of your triumphant return in no time, Inquisitor. You should be very happy with yourself.”

"You know me,” said Sene. "I cannot _wait_ to hear the stories they’ll tell.”

“Now, let us take Caer Bronach by storm.”

“I should get Solas. He’s starting to look a little green from here.”

“No, no. It’s all that rift energy,” said Dorian. “Gets in your pores, I hear. Solas has a great many pores. Very small. It's enough to make one jealous.”

“Of his small pores?" She laughed, and she plopped straight down onto her butt in the grass. She mixed up some dirt with her hand. The sun was going down now. The day was getting cooler, and the stars were sneaking up on them like little songs. Dorian sat down beside her.

“So, you and the Bull, huh? What’s that like?” she said.

Dorian sighed exquisitely. “It’s like nothing. There is no _me and the Bull_.”

"But there will be,” said Sene, elbowing him in the ribs. “Come on.”

“You elves. We’re not all mad, naked slaves to the moonlight, you know.”

She looked up and saw Solas coming toward them. The Iron Bull could not be contained.

“Speaking of,” said Dorian. “This would be my cue to leave the two of you to your reunion.” He took his leave, nodded at Solas, and joined Bull at the dead beast’s flaming tail. Iron Bull picked up Dorian now instead, doing the same as he had done to Solas.

“I’m worried he’s going to drop his trousers,” said Solas, referring to the Iron Bull, out of breath, looking cleansed, renewed from the fight, “give our dead dragon one last…impalement. If you will.”

“Wow,” she said. “Good one.”

“Thank you.” He fell to his knees before her—plumb beat, but exhilarated. He looked young and fine and without reservation. He let his fingers feel through the braids in her hair, where they pulled away from her face, and he touched the dampened ringlets that had come loose at the back of her neck. “You did well, Inquisitor,” he said, his voice deep, focused on her hair, on the freckles of her jaw. “I am proud to be here.”

Sene held his heavy, warm face with both hands. She felt around to the back of his neck, found his eyes with her own, the long and the chill of them. “Are you surprised?” she said.

“No,” he said, serious. “And, yes. You have never _not_ surprised me, vhenan.”

“You did well, too,” she said.

“I did what I could.”

Then, she kissed him, and she felt him break immediately, slide deep into his old ways, return to her, his every movement etched in relief at her safety, her strength, but also, freed. With their success, a new permission had been granted. Unthinking, he had already moved one hand down her back and, with the other, begun to take down her braids. Things were escalating. She had to stop him.

“ _Min’nydha,_ ” she said.

“ _Ahnsul?_ ” he breathed, pressing forward. “ _Sahl’in, vhenan._ _Garas, aman ara'mis._ _Juvenas atisha inor’adahlen i lea’vune. Isalan na._ ”

“ _Isalan na, Solas._ So much. I will be yours. _Holma bre, gasha. Min’nydha._ But—If we do this now, we’ll never make it back to the fort.”

“Ah, yes,” he said, his fingers playing to the backs of her ears now, sending chills down her spine. “ _Ir’abelas, vhenan_. Your duty.”

“Yes, that,” said Sene, “and, also, I promised Sera there would be bells first.”

This threw him, fully unlocked him from the moment. He looked at her. He said, “Bells?”

“We should be able to find bells somewhere, right?”

“Are you two crazy shits coming or what?” said Bull. He wore nothing but a pair of torn trousers, and he had the rest of his armor tucked under his arm. As usual, Solas had been very close in his assumptions.

Dorian stood beside him, almost blushing. “Please do,” said Dorian. “There will be plenty of time to shirk the shem’len later and to make sweet, elven love in the moonlight, or on a rooftop somewhere. Whatever tweaks your fancy. But for now, and for the love of Andraste, let us return together to the fort, pay our dues, and then drink heavily.”

Solas closed his eyes, shook his head a bit to collect himself. He’d been on the edge for a moment there. She could tell. “Of course,” he said.

“Extra drinks for you, Solas,” said Bull. “I’ll make them myself.”

“Uh, be careful,” said Sene. “I’ve had those drinks.”

“We'll see,” said Solas.

Bull and Dorian turned around to head back then, said they’d meet them in the place where they’d all stashed their mounts—not far, hidden in an old gray piece of ruin beside a grand, leafless tree. Once they were gone, Solas got up and helped Sene to her feet. They held hands as they walked, lighthearted, a ways behind. Things were calm. At some point, however, Sene felt rowdy, yanked his head down so she could put her mouth to his ear, started taunting him with sweet, dirty nothings in Elvhen—quite a few of them that he’d taught her himself. This went on for a while until, eventually, he decided he'd had enough, and he took her bow, picked her up, and tossed her over his shoulder. It was twilight now as she laughed. The whole world had turned purple.

“Behave, vhenan,” Solas said, carrying her, the bow swinging in his right hand as he walked.

“Or what?” she said.

“Or we shall not make it to the mounts. Sera won’t have her bells. And there will be nothing but lizards for both of us.”

"Shh,” said Sene. “You speak too much sense, Solas.”

He laughed at this, but he did not put her down.

She looked up from where she was flung, delicately, over his shoulder, smiling, bobbing as he walked, and watching that dead dragon, a black smudge in the fading distance. _Speaking of lizards,_ she thought. _It does not look so big from here._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Elven Translations:
> 
> “Min’nydha.” - "Tonight."
> 
> "Ahnsul?" - "Why?"
> 
> "Sahl'in, vhenan. Garas, aman ara'mis. Juvenas atisha inor'adahlen i lea'vune. Isalan na." - "Now, my heart. Let me fuck you. We will find peace in the trees and the moonlight. I need you."
> 
> "...Holma bre, gasha. Min'nydha." - "...to mold deeply, completely. Tonight."


	13. Carillon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the dragon, there is a party at Caer Bronach. Solas surprises Sene and Sera with a gift. Sene must convince Solas that she is healed in the belfry.
> 
>  

“Hey, where's Solas?” said Sera after a while.

The fire had gotten crowded. They were way up top by the flagpole now, and Charter, free from her duties for the evening, had begun to sing. She was quite good, and a pretty, mild elf with long ears and red hair and long, long legs. Sort of like Sene. The Iron Bull, all night, had been ignoring advances from several of the women and quite a few men, all Inquisition soldiers who had somehow managed to get the night off from Cullen. At this point, Bull seemed full taken with Dorian, who sort of just idled by his side, almost subdued, talking and drinking from his great big cup. At one point, Sene watched him reach curiously for one of Bull's horns, but Bull took him by the wrist, whispered something in his ear that made Dorian blush so hard he looked like a radish.

Somebody had called in a bard from New Crestwood and she sang over by the flagpole. There was nothing but the black night sky behind her, watching. Sera and Sene sat side-by-side on a bench with their knees touching, sort of tucked in the back so they could see everything going on but no one could really see them. They wore bows in their hair that they’d fashioned from strips of fabric they cut from old shirts, but they were unable to find any bells. They’d searched everywhere—through all the broom closets in the entire keep it seemed. The party was great fun anyway, and the fire was high and bright, and the Iron Bull’s drinks were strong and they all tasted like plants from Sene's childhood. Sene felt warm and sort of dreamy from the alcohol, and she was tired from the fight but also exhilarated and filled with anticipation. Solas had been there at first and even had a few mugs of something pungent, but at some point not long before, he had disappeared. She began to wonder if he had stumbled off somewhere to rest. He was so exhausted, she would not have blamed him. Still, even if it were only for a little while, she wished he would have invited her. She looked around, didn’t see any sign of him at all.

“He's been gone a little while now,” said Sene. “He's been so tired. Could be he's sleeping.”

"Well I want food," said Sera, missing the melancholy in Sene's voice. Or, perhaps, just ignoring it.

"I think it's all gone," said Sene. "I don't think I'm that drunk. We could go hunt something."

"Pffffft. Don't be daft."

"It's not daft if it works."

"There's got to be something left," said Sera, looking around, plucking a piece of hair from her mouth. "Bleh. Where do you think Commander Cully is hiding? Bet he's got the goods. He's fancy."

"I told him to take the night off, but I haven't seen him. We could check the gate. He works too much."

“Oh, off with it already,” said Sera.

"Huh?"

"You want to go looking for _him_ , just admit it."

"Solas?" said Sene.

"Yeah. You miss him or something?"

"He'll come back when he's ready."

“How can you miss him when you're never apart from him?”

“It's not that simple. After what happened—I don’t know. He changed. We haven’t…you know. Not in a while.”

With this, Sera became oddly serious. "I see," she said. She was drinking something strong and herbal from a wooden tankard. She looked down at her shoes. "Not surprised."

"What do you mean?" said Sene.

“It's just—I get it. Him, fear. You didn’t see him like I did, Quiz. At the Sule-darn Keep thingy. He was...scared. Shaky. Rambling in elfy, real bad. I never thought I'd see daddy Solas scared like that, and then I did. He's probably afraid of hurting you is all."

"I just feel like it's time to move on," said Sene. She hated to think of him this way: alone, anxious, exhausted. But she was sick of talking about it, too. And feeling about it. Thinking about it. It had happened, and it was over. She lived, _because_ of Solas. But now, she'd slayed a dragon. She was whole again, and much peril still lie ahead. Her body had healed, and she wanted to use it again. Sene did not always understand her own body, how she was tall and thin as a reed, but still fast and strong. She often felt gawky, all limbs and nothing else. She was a terrible dancer and too rangy for horseback. But there were a couple of things Sene knew that her body did very well. One of them was was violence. The other was Solas.

“Right,” said Sera. “You're right. And I don’t want to think about this. Any of this. Don’t want to talk about it either. Not anymore. You’re all right. The world sings all new. That’s what matters. I want to talk about you and us and not about how you almost—you know. It’s all good now, yeah?”

“ _Yes_.” Sene leaned against her, took a drink from her cup. “But you did call Solas _daddy._ Maybe we could talk about that,” she said.

“Pft, you.”

“Anyway, I think Dorian may finally ride the Bull tonight.”

Sera snorted. “Or the other way around. Can’t imagine the Tevinter on top of…that.”

“Oh, I can,” said Sene.

"Andraste's tits," said Sera. "I'm hungry."

Together, they watched Dorian and the Iron Bull. They sat on a leather mat on the ground in front of the fire, and Bull kept grazing his hand across Dorian’s lower back. Whenever he did this, so slight, Dorian would flinch at first but then settle when he realized, edge a little bit closer. He was not unnerved, but the Bull had a way of keeping things new. Taking him by surprise. He was powerful, and Dorian was used to being in charge. Bull's dominance, she could tell, allured him. It was possessive, too, Bull's touching, in this way that made Sene feel familiar. It also made her feel needful.

"I've had too much of this,” she said, looking down into the murky bottom of her cup. "Also, I feel like I'm being watched. Do you feel it?"

“Well, yeah,” said Sera, looking over her shoulder. "But only because we _are_."

“What?"

“The _elven man._ He's back, like you said."

"Where?"

"Straight behind us. _Watching._ "

Sene turned around, and when she did, she saw him, tall and just sharp, leaning against a ladder. He had changed out of his armors into something simpler—just long pants and a pale blue shirt that hung off him a little, making his angles stand out in the moonlight. He looked washed, refreshed. Almost too much for her to take. He had been looking past her at the fire but when she finally caught his eye, he offered a little wave, and with this, she felt everything sort of give way. He looked so good, so _hers_ , and it was warm and urgent, and she wanted him. Very badly. “Shit,” she said. “How long has he been standing there like that?”

Sera laughed. "You've got the face on."

“I’ll be right back.”

“Get off!”

“I’m serious. Hold my drink, just for a moment.”

“Can't do, _Inquisitor_.”

“Please don’t call me _Inquisitor._ It sounds weird.”

“I know. That's 'cause it is weird.”

“Call me something else.”

“S _ex Pout_?”

“What?"

“Yeah. The face. The one you got on, right now. _Sex. Pout._ Like you’re wanting, needing, pure gantin' for it. It’s a look you get. It’s how I know you’re about to go off and get rammed by the apostate.”

“You must really miss Dagna,” said Sene, “if you’re calling him the apostate again.”

“Shut it!”

“You should have brought her with. Maybe you can have her meet us in the Fallow Mire.”

“Bwah,” said Sera, turning pink, and then she shoved Sene playfully, elbow in the ribs. “Go on,” she said, drinking from her tankard. “I’m serious. You know where to find me when you’re done. _If_ you’re done.”

But it was too late anyway. He was standing right behind them now.

"Ladies," he said.

Sene had smelled and seen him coming, and she smiled. But Sera about jumped out of her skin when he did this. “What the—don’t _do_ that. Why do you do that?”

“Why do I do what?” said Solas.

“Be such an… _elf_.”

“Because I am such an… _elf_. You should give it a try sometime, Sera. Everything is much sexier when you’re an _elf_.”

“I can’t even with that tripe.”

“Where have you been?” said Sene. “Did you take a bath?”

“I did,” he said. “A visual I'm sure Sera is thrilled to have."

“Nutters,” said Sera.

"But mostly, I was finding this." He held out a small, white velvet satchel.

"What is it?" said Sene.

He did not answer. From the velvet satchel, he tipped a piece of green silk—it seemed to be wrapped around something small. He dropped the satchel to the floor. As was everything with Solas, his movements were deliberate, and he kept them in suspense.

“Is it food? Come _on._ We're starved,” said Sera.

"I'm fine," said Sene.

“Patience,” said Solas. “I’ve got one for each of you.”

Delicately then, with the tips of his fingers, he discarded the silk and revealed two small sleigh bells, nestled together in the palm of his hand. They were a cool, blue metal and each one had been tied to a small piece of ribbon.

“Bells!” said Sera. “You found bells! Wait a minute. You _would_ find bells. Elfy!”

“I can’t believe you found bells. Where did you get these?” said Sene.

He handed one to each of them. “One of the merchants was selling an old court jester uniform. I haggled him down to four silvers, cut these from the feet, and tied the little ribbons myself. I’m sorry there aren’t more.” He crouched down then, sitting back on his heels. She felt his warm hand on her lower back then, an easy gesture, but still, she lost her breath. She looked down, could see the almost stark outline of his collar bone, peaking out from the wide neck of his shirt. He didn’t wear his familiar jaw pendant. His eyes looked an icy gray that night, almost blue.

“Ribbons, too” said Sene.

“Right,” said Sera. "Here." She took Sene’s bell, tied it to the buttonhole in the pocket of her shirt, tugged it. The bell sang a little song. She then did the same for herself.

“Very good,” said Solas.

“All right, all right,” said Sera. “Good on you, Sol-arse. Acting all secret. Bringing bells to the women in the moonlight. Thoughtful. I’ll give you that.”

“It was no trouble,” he said, standing. “Now, I—” He seemed lost for words. He’d stuffed his hands in his pockets, bit his lower lip, looked away.

“Out with it,” said Sera.

He looked at Sene then, the eyes big. A request. This made Sera laugh. “Never thought of you as a puppy dog before, Solas,” she said, fussing with her bell, jingling it again and again. “Usually you’re all S _hut up, Stupid!_ and _I’m in charge here!_ But here you are now, _whimpering_ at the Inquisitor’s feet.”

“I hardly think I’m whimpering.”

“It’s funny,” said Sera.

“I like puppies,” said Sene. “I used to have one until it, you know turned to a dog. Puppies are squishy.”

“Squishy?” said Solas.

Sera laughed, again.

Solas shook his head, ignored her, turned to Sene specifically. “I’ll be upstairs,” he said.

“Which room?”

“See that ladder there? Go all the way to the top. Find the stairs, and take them as high as you can go. Join me when you’d like, Inquisitor. I’ll wait up.” Then, he turned to Sera. “You are not invited, Sera. Though I do hope you’ll enjoy your bell.” He tipped his imaginary hat to her.

“Oh, I will,” she said.

Then, he was gone. Sene felt a pain, a longing. But it had seemed all right.

Sera finished off what was left in her tankard then and wiped her mouth off on the back of her hand. “This stuff is good,” said Sera. “Like plant juice. Or something. Green. Greeny."

“Mine is more orange. Like…yams.”

“Yaaaack.”

“My cousin used to make a good stew with yams.”

“Your _Dalish_ cousin?”

“Yes. My Dalish cousin. I'm Dalish. Not always proud, but it's what I am. So come off it.”

“Yeah, yeah. I get it. And I need another one of these. Maybe I’ll try your…Dalish yammy…whatever.”

“Maybe I'll try your Green one.”

“Aren’t you going off with your elven man?” said Sera. “He seems raring. And I don’t mind. Really. Bells, see? It’s all fine as long as you are.”

But Sene felt like she owed one to Sera. She was having fun. The night was still new, and the bells had been just enough. She knew he would want her to take her time. She knew he would keep his word. He would wait for her. “One more drink. I want to go talk to Bull anyway.”

“About what?”

“About some of the stuff he said while we were fighting the dragon today.”

"Like what?”

“Weird stuff,” said Sene. “Like, intense dirty talk.”

“To the Tevinter? Right, dirty on the battlefield. I get it. _Eat my entire deep and thorny arse!_ Like that? Not too surprising if you ask me.”

“No, not to Dorian,” said Sene. “To the dragon.”

“Ohhh,” said Sera, getting up, holding out her hand for Sene to take. “Well, no surprise there either. Like a big, lumpy onion, he is. Every layer’s got more…phwoar. Also, smelly.”

"Well his drinks are going to have me on my ass."

“Your  _ass,_ " said Sera, giggling.

 

She slipped away not long after. The party was still up and up, though the fire was dying, and no one really cared to stoke it. That's because it was usually Solas who did it. He always remembered the fire. He was good at things like that. Anyway, after that last drink and no food, Sera had grown belligerent. Bull had her in a full-blown headlock. People were starting to gather.

"Is this all you’ve got, you daft shit dragonfucker?” she said, beating up on his huge, craggy thigh with her fists. Unsuccessful, obviously.

“Sera, when you yell like that, it’s like a bee buzzing in my armpit. I think I kind of like it. Keep going.”

“Bwah. The smell! The smell!”

Dorian stood by, just shaking his head.

Solas had made a room for them at the very top of the highest tower of the keep. Sene hadn’t even known it was there—a room for him to make; however, it was very much like him, to find the safest, quietest, most private place in any keep. He had a talent for this. There was a lantern hanging from a hook on the wall at the bottom of the stairs. It took her a while to climb all the way to the top, but when she got there, she stood in front of the great, heavy door, in darkness. She put her hand on the cold wood. She could almost feel him there, on the other side, buzzing, waiting. She pushed it open. It made a creaking sound and closed loudly behind her.

Inside, there was a small fire with smoke rising, leaving through the open roof. She could see the stars. It was an old belfry. The carillon were in full disrepair, but still, she could almost hear their old song. It seemed a strange place for bells, but still. She liked it. When had he found this place? So many bells that night. She wondered what it could mean. Ancient music, the tower, full of desuetude, green vines still crawling up and down the walls. It was the kind of place she had often pictured Solas—where he would stop to camp during his lonely travels before the breach. He could make a home just about anywhere—she knew that by now. He understood the importance of fire and air, fabrics and furs and hidden, enclosed spaces. He could engineer wonderful lamps full of veilfire and bring to life the colors of the evening with his magic. He was very good with atmosphere. While these qualities endeared her, made him seem strong, they also worried her. She did not like to think of him wandering the world alone, with no one to guide or to ground him. She feared he could get lost in obsession, and that his focus, unchecked, would consume him. It was exactly what had happened while she slept, healing, in the Fade.

And yet, she often still hesitated to put too much stake in how he needed her. There were moments she convinced herself that he would be lost without her, but in these same moments, she felt naïve, off-balance. She could not help it. He loved and wanted and needed her body. This, she knew. And she also knew that she’d seen parts of him that no one else could. They were very close, almost mind-readers. Whatever love they did or did not make, their kinship was unrivaled, as if fated, and there did seem to be big ways in which he relied on her. He feared for and protected her. But with all of this, and despite his reaction to her injury at Suledin Keep, she still had come to know him too well, and the deeper she got, the more worried she became. She was his possession, and he was hers, but in the end, Solas was a man of habit. The way he avoided the Fade with her around, it was almost as if he knew he'd be tempted to stay there. All or nothing. Hot and cold. And here, see how he could build a home from nothing? He had done it a thousand time before. His habit was to keep moving. It was to pull away. It didn’t matter how much he actually loved her or tried to reassure her otherwise. She always felt like she was chasing him.

Then.

“Vhenan,” he said. He was standing there, conjuring veilfire inside a big red bowl. Once he was finished, he set it down on a small table by the window. There was a bed fashioned of rich, blue fabrics, hay, and pillows on the floor, and there was a chair, and the fire, and he wore the same thing he’d been wearing downstairs—the long pants, the wide-necked, pale blue shirt. It hung off him now, half his shoulder bare. The freckles, like hers, and the collar bone. He smiled. His eyes, so gray. He placed his hands behind his back and stood, waiting. She set the lamp down on the floor and went to him. When she was close enough, he pulled her into his chest, scrubbed behind her ears, and pressed his lips to her forehead. She put her arms around him, felt the long muscles of his back, the triangular shape. She breathed. It felt so good to be here.

“I was surprised,” he said, “that you and Sera did not find this place. On your quest for bells, I mean.”

“To be honest, we only looked in broom closets. I had no idea that a keep like this would have a belfry.”

"It surprised me, too," he said. "Seems almost fated. Whoever was here before us must have greatly enjoyed the sound of carillon."

“Solas,” she said, her face buried in his chest, breathing him all the way in. He smelled clean, but he still somehow smelled like him, and she was sleepy with booze and warm and soft and getting softer in his arms.

“Yes, vhenan?”

“You found bells,” she said. She pulled away so that she could look at him. He stared, so intensely, but she was no longer afraid of the way he looked at her. “You made a room for us."

"We needed a room, vhenan," he said. She saw him notice it then, the silly bow in her hair from the party. He removed with his fingers, intent, let it fall it to the floor.

"I know, but that's not everything," she said. "In the Emprise du Lion, you saved me, and you hid me in the Fade, and you stayed by my side as I slept, as I healed. _You_ haven’t slept. You are always on my side, and you protect me, but you also trust me. I—”

She felt a little broken. She was not sure what she was trying to say, what she was trying to get out of him. A promise, perhaps. It was drunken. She was dizzy and embarrassed, but she also felt bold. He put a piece of hair behind her ear in his regular way and became very serious. He seemed to be searching for something as well, something in her eyes, her heart, or anything to say to her. He looked down, but she put his chin up again so that she could see the fear in his eyes.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said. He stared at her in what almost seemed to be confusion. He was unsure of himself. It was not like him.

"What is it, Solas?"

"The thought of losing you," he said, tracing his hands from her ears down her neck, her shoulders, to her elbows. She shivered. "It proved to be too much."

“What do you mean too much?”

“Please, vhenan,” he said. He held her face in his hands now, and he smiled reassuringly. “Come, sit with me.”

“We don’t have to talk about it,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Do not apologize for speaking from your heart, Isene,” he said. “It teaches me. You are honest. You do not question that which you feel. You say it, out loud. That is part of why I love you.”

 _This_ , she thought, _this is the way_. It was not a promise, but it was something, and she was slowly losing her grip.

He led her to the pile he’d made for their bed. It was as soft as it could be. They sat upon it, facing each other, but they did not touch. Some weight lifted off them, almost for no reason at all. It was a relief. As if they’d both realized that whatever had happened, they were slowly moving past it. Solas was smiling, low and hidden, but it was there. His habit was not to smile too big or too much. Part of his mystique, and his sadness. She smiled bigger than he did.

“I’m going to do something now,” she said.

“And what is that?” he said.

“Close your eyes.”

“Oh, really?”

“Close them, and don’t open them again until I say.”

He shook his head a little as he smiled. But he did as she told him. He plucked a pin from her hair and he put it in his mouth and he closed his eyes.

“Okay,” she said.

She took a deep breath, and she unbuttoned her shirt, quickly, shrugged it off her shoulders. The bell made a little jingling. She wore nothing underneath but a pale undershirt, and she took that, off, too. Her heart was beating very fast. She got up, she tugged off her boots, stepped out of her pants, her underclothes, left them in a quiet pile on the floor, and she stood naked, before him.

“Keep them shut,” she said.

He nodded, but the smile was gone now. She wondered if he could smell her. It always seemed like he could.

She sat back down, across from him on the bed, on the floor, not touching. “Okay,” she said. “You can open them.”

When he opened his eyes, she thought his gaze would be drawn immediately to her nakedness, but it was not. He stared into her eyes as if he’d known what she was going to do all along. A smirk now. He leaned toward her—this much seemed accidental, out of his control—but they still did not touch. “What now, vhenan?” he said.

She’d lost her breath a little. His restraint impressed and excited her, but she tried not to show it. “Come here,” she said. “Give me your right hand.”

Still without breaking his gaze, he gave her his hand. She felt it, studied it—the rough palms, the worn skin, the dry knuckles. She scooted toward him, and she placed his hand on her back, on the high ridge of the place where the Shadow had impaled her. When he felt it, his expression changed. He tightened. His eyebrows went up, and he looked down again. But only for a moment, to gather himself. She could feel him breaking and sighing as she let go of his hand and he let it linger still, fingers clinging bravely to the edges of the scar as he met her eyes once more.

“Do you feel that?” she said.

“Yes,” he said, his voice very deep now. He took the pin from his teeth, flicked it away.

“I just wanted you to feel it."

"Why, vhenan?"

"Because I’m healed," she said. "Because that’s what we do, Solas. We heal.”

He was looking at her, again, almost confused. As if he didn’t understand. But it didn’t seem to matter. He lifted her lightly, set her into his lap so that her legs wrapped all the way around him. She was above him now, looking down. He did not stop looking at her, and once she was there, on top of him, he did not take his hand off the scar. The other he had on the back of her neck, under her hair, clutching in what felt to her like desperation. She kissed him. He kissed her back. He let himself drift backward then until he lie there beneath her on the makeshift bed. She would do all she could not to scare him away. Like their first time, in Skyhold, when he had been the one to guide her through the warm, woolly wilderness of sex, with such authority, such empathy. With everything that had happened after that—the demon in the Fade, how she had almost died in his arms in a snowy hellscape. He was afraid of hurting her. She had to show him that it was okay.

She felt beneath his shirt and pulled it over his head. He was lost, now, full hard beneath her and just waiting. He did not try to take control. She edged back, lifted her hips so she could make him all naked, all hers, one leg at a time. And once he was bare to her, she eased him inside—at first, just the tip—and she hovered there, tilted in circles, watching him close his eyes, swallow hard, and then, as she lowered herself completely to consume him, his hands firmed their hold on her hips, and he put his head back, and the air went all the way out of his lungs, and he shivered, and groaned. She stayed upright, her hands on his chest, feeling how he filled her, grazing the collar bones, the pale angularity of him, the hidden strength. She rocked, solid but slow. She didn’t want it to be fast. She wanted it to take forever. She wanted to stop time.

Still, it had been so long. They could not keep perfect, could not keep still. She built speed almost subconsciously, tilting her hips, pushing him deeper inside so that he touched to all the right places and angles. The feeling was agonizing, unreal, heightened by their prolonged celibacy. Her face was closer to his now, her red hair a curtain, surrounding. He pressed a firm hand up the side of her body, from her hip to her neck where he held her by the hair. She liked it when he pulled her hair. He opened his eyes, but there was something there now, something new—confusion. Again. It worried her even more this time. She stopped immediately. He clutched her to his chest.

"Solas?" she said.

“It's nothing,” he said, shaking his head, like he needed to get rid of something—some thought or memory. “Nothing. Just— _Melenas, vhenan. Suinas._ Be still. Just for a moment," he said. "So that I can feel you."

“ _Eolasan, vhenan,_ ” she said.

“There’s so much—” he said. He was losing it. He was out of breath and ragged as she lie still, sprawled on top of him. He held her very tight. His chest rising, falling more quickly. It alarmed her, but she could not move.

“So much what?” she said.  “Vhenan. Be calm.”

“I’m calm,” he said. “I'm calm.”

" _Atisha,_ vhenan _."_

They lie there like that, for a little while. She could hear his heart, beating like a drum in the cage of his chest, and she could feel him wrestling with something. Something. Eventually, however, she could feel his grip loosen on her. He moved both hands down to her hips then.

" _E_ _nas’sal,_ " he said.

_“Thu na isalas em, Solas?”_

_“Ma eolasas em, vhenan,_ ” he said, low, an ungodly deep. A growl. He had latched to her hips, her face not an inch from his own. He stared her down, begged her. “ _Ma eolasas ara isalathen. Ame isalor. Ame isathe. Ar numavan. Ar telsylmanan. Sathan, ma lanas su’em ise, nar lath’in or’avise gaelathe. Sathan, Isene. Sathan._ ”

_Sathan._

It went on and on with him like that, begging, moaning in great, extended elvhen sighs as she started back up again, pressing, pushing, pulling, riding him into the floor beneath the carillon. But soon, she became antsy and breathy and hot and she lost her breath, and it was at that point that he took over. In a single, slow motion, he flipped her to her back, right hand behind her knee, pinning it high to her chest so that she was tilted up and open and he could feel all the way to the back of her, as far and high and deep as he could get, until she gave out, until she, too, was begging in elvhen, and he lost himself, sheathed within her for quite some time until finally, he buckled, and he came so strongly, he felt his eyes roll back into his head, his entire body go weak, then numb, then nothing. He came till their was nothing left. Just nothing. To give or to take. Being inside of her again, after so much time, so much despair, the solace and the intense paradox and pleasures, they comforted him and made him feel real and finally, satiated. He combed a hand through her hair, kissed her eyes. She was breathing heavily, her head tilted slightly, her eyes closed to him, collecting herself. She was beautiful, and she was alive.

He did not want it to end. He held her close and rolled to his side, pulling her with him, one of her legs still high, wrapped tight to his waist. Now they could just lie there and breathe for a while, be thankful, be still. Eventually, she spoke.

" _Enaste_ , Solas," she said.

" _Nuva lasa su ma enaste,_ " he answered.

She opened her great, green eyes after that, looked at him a little funny. "That's so old fashioned," she said, smiling.

"I can be very old fashioned," he said. "You should know that by now, vhenan."

"I do," she said, and she put her full face into his neck so that he could bury his own inside the red, sweet nest of her hair. He thought she must have done it on purpose. She knew how he felt about her hair. That hair.

 

He did not think of it anymore, how he had seen her—the child, and why he'd asked Sene to stop. There had been only a flash, hardly anything, but the hot, bright grief had confused him for a  moment. Confusion made him anxious. Little girl with red hair and green dress. Her ears. His eyes. Mostly, it had been the eyes that stopped him cold. Like seeing his own death. So familiar in their lonely gray. But it had not been a plea. It had passed quickly and seamlessly in the presence of Sene, and now it was gone for good as he lie there with her, his hands on her long, hard body. She, intact and strong. _Sal vun’in. Sal era’vun._ All new, healed for him.

After everything, he still had not told her the truth. There had been a moment—almost. He grew cowardly, unworthy. But as they lie there now, entangled in a belfry he had made into their temporary home, he was not sure how he could ever tell her. Whatever the cost.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Elven Translations:
> 
> “Melenas, vhenan. Suinas.” - "Wait, vhenan. Be silent."
> 
> “Eolasan, vhenan.” - I understand, vhenan."/"Okay, vhenan."
> 
> "Enas’sal.” - "Go on."
> 
> “Thu na isalas em, Solas?” - "What should I do, Solas?"
> 
> “Ma eolasas em, vhenan.” - "You know me, vhenan."
> 
> “Ma eolasas ara isalathen.” - "You know what I want."
> 
> “Ame isalor. Ame isathe. Ar numavan. Ar telsylmanan. Sathan, ma lanas su’em nar lath’in or’avise gaelath. Sathan, Isene. Sathan.” -  
> “I am needy. I am hungry. I thirst. I drown. Please, give me your whole fiery heart. Please, Isene. Please.” 
> 
> (He begs, in his way.)
> 
> “Enaste.” - "Thank you." (Literal: "Grace."/"Blessing.")
> 
> “Nuva lasa su ma enaste.” - "You're welcome." (Literal/archaic: "May it give you grace.") CONTEXTUAL NOTE: Sene is surprised, because this is very old fashioned, rarely used in Dalish vocabulary. She probably has not heard it phrased quite like this before, or at least not outside of legend.


	14. Domesticity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some awkward moments. Famine leads to feast.

Sene awoke with a start. It was early morning in the belfry, and the fire was gone to embers. The sun barely filtered through the bells, scattering to the stone in strange fragments of blue and gold. She sat up in their makeshift bed with the blue sheets pooled to her waist. Still naked and flushed from sleep, she collected herself, and then she looked at him. Asleep on his side, facing her. He had his cheek pressed to the crook of his arm, half-lost to the depths of the pillow, and he was warm and vulnerable, snuggled deep, far away. She placed a gentle hand on his forehead, and he did not shift. She watched the long, pale curve of his back rise and fall. He’d slept the whole night through, had not stirred once. _Finally,_ she thought. She felt deeply possessive of him in that moment.

She reached down, found Solas’s pale blue shirt on the floor, fixed the sleeves and threw it over her head. The fabric was soft, but the stitching raw. She was certain he’d sewn it himself. The room had grown cold, so she got up to fix the fire. She realized that she hadn’t done this in such a long time—with Solas and countless servants there to do it for her. It felt good to be self-sufficient, even in small ways. When she had been in the Free Marches, her clan spent most of its time on the Minanter, and she was used to doing nearly everything herself. She’d spend three, four nights at a time simply sleeping in trees, high up, far away, swallowed into the forests. Nobody else could keep up with her, so she hunted alone. It made her bitter and superior in some ways, but it was also lonely and very boring. It was why, as she got older, she’d taken to spending so much time in human settlements and villages, even against Keeper Misyl’s wishes. There was community there, a sense of belonging. If she could find someone who told good stories, who liked long conversations, it would sometimes be whole days before she’d return to the woods, the river, and her clan at all. Like the blacksmith of Ansburg, his beautiful bows, old and wise, who would tell her tales about his late wife and how she liked to kill mice with her frying pan, and he would give her a bit of feather and pine so she could help him fletch the arrows. She knew too well of the corruptions associated with “human society,” but this wasn’t it. Slavery, the Chantry. Those were institutions, not people. She understood why the Dalish were suspicious, even hateful; however, at some point, she grew so wary of isolationism that she began to wonder which was truly better for the soul.

Once she gave the fire its roots back, she crouched down to warm her hands for a little while. She went back to Solas and put the sheet up to his chin. It would take a moment for the heat to fill the room, especially with the open ceiling. He stirred only slightly to her touch.

Then, there was a knock on the door. It startled, almost angered her. She rushed, yanked the shirt down as far as it would go. When she got to the door, she put her ear to the wood and asked, as quietly as she could, who was there.

“It’s Commander Cullen, your Worship.”

“Cullen?”

“I am aware of the hour. But if you could—it’s quite urgent.”

Flustered, she immediately put her hands on her hair. A pile of curls all wadded on top of her head, it felt like a rodent refuge, though she was sure that Solas probably would have liked it. He liked all things weird when it came to her hair. “Just a moment," she said.

She looked around the room for her clothes, but everything had gotten so messed. She found Solas’s pants instead and hiked them as high as they’d go, pulling the drawstring tight. They still hung off her in a big way, so long they completely covered her bare feet as she twisted her hair into a fast, makeshift braid. She secured it with a piece of twine just as she got to the door, and then she pulled it open just enough to slip through to the hallway, where she found Cullen standing very tall, very handsome, as always, in his boyish way. At first, he stared at her—the outfit, the braid. It must have come as a surprise to see her so…undone. But he looked away quickly, in embarrassment.

“I’m so sorry to disturb you, Inquisitor,” he said, his voice familiar.

“It’s all right,” she said, smoothing her hands over the front of the shirt, then crossing her arms over her chest. “Is everything all right?”

“No,” he said. “Or, matters have taken on a new urgency, I’m afraid.”

“Explain.”

“We got word this morning that Morrigan has made a new discovery. It pertains to the Arbor Wilds. I'd do you no favors trying to explain it myself. All I know is that it requires your immediate attention. I’ve already begun corralling the troops. We must return to Skyhold as soon as possible.”

“Skyhold?” said Sene.

“I have informed New Crestwood's, er, _interim_ mayor of the setback. He more than understands and has welcomed us to return whenever we are able.”

She noticed then, his gloved hands, and his furs, and how he always seemed to be dressed and buttoned and ready to go. He held a clipboard and a quill and still would not meet her eyes.

“Commander,” she said.

When she said this, he finally looked at her, albeit, only just. “Yes, Inquisitor?”

“Do you always dress like this?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I mean—do you ever just, not wear armor?”

She realized that the question seemed odd but let it sort of drift between them anyway.

“Of course,” he said. “I wear…many things.”

“All right,” she said. “I just—I only mean that you don’t have to be so formal with me.”

“I apologize,” he said.

“Don’t apologize,” she said, fussing with her braid. “I’m far too…casual…right now for apologies. I just wanted you to know that it’s okay.”

Though he was still a little unsure of himself, this did get a smile out of him. He softened. “I—yes. Well, it is early.”

The door opened behind her then. Solas. He stood, shirtless, in the doorway with nothing but a blue sheet wrapped tight at the waist. He looked calm, knowing, a masterful guard given the situation.

“Commander,” he said. "Is everything all right?"

“I’m sorry, Solas,” said Cullen, staring at the ceiling, the floor, anything to avert his eyes. “I assure you, I would not have come if the matter were not of the utmost urgency.”

Solas looked at Sene. It was a long look, dissecting, head to toe. He was taking in the outfit. He raised his eyebrows, once, and smirked. This, of all things, made her fidget.

“Morrigan has new information,” she said. “We’re needed back at Skyhold.”

“I see,” said Solas. “When do we leave?”

“As soon as possible,” said Cullen, clearing his throat. He turned to Sene. “I mean—please, take your time. It will be a little while before the troops are fully packed and ready to go.”

“We’ll be along as soon as we can,” she said, nodding politely, still with her arms folded, clutching to her chest.

“Thank you, Inquisitor.” Cullen looked at Solas then. “Again, I apologize for the intrusion.”

“It’s not a problem,” said Solas, smiling in earnest. “The matter is urgent. Sometimes intrusion is but a necessary means to an end.” He seemed fully aware of how awkward the situation was, and yet, he showed no concern.

“Remember what I said, Cullen,” said Sene.

“Right,” he said, scratching at the back of his head. “Too casual for apologies, right. I shall see you both soon.” He bowed only slightly, out of habit, smiled, and then hurried down the stairs, out of sight.

They were alone.

“Well, that was pleasant,” said Solas.

“Sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t find my things. I was trying not to wake you.”

“I appreciate that.”

“I’m not even sure how he found us.”

“I told him where we’d be,” said Solas. “Last night. Other than you and me, he's the only person who knows we're up here.”

“You told him?”

He nodded, adjusting the sheet at his narrow waist. “The Commander of the Inquisition Army must always know the whereabouts of his Inquisitor. Am I wrong?”

“No,” she said. “You’re right. That was very astute, Solas.”

“Well, I am known for my astuteness, Isene.”

She smiled, despite herself. “How did you sleep?”

“Very well,” he said. “I have not slept that well in…some time.”

“I’m glad.”

“Now, come back inside.”

They returned to the belfry, closed the door. Solas dropped the sheet and went to the fire. He stood there, freckled, naked, observing. “This is good handiwork,” he said.

“I’m a Dalish huntress from the Free Marches,” she said. “I know how to build a fire. People forget that.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” he said. “I was merely complimenting you.”

“Oh. Well, thank you.”

He turned to face her. “At some point, you’re going to have to give those back,” he said, referring to the clothes.

She looked down, felt along the soft fabric of the shirt. “I like them,” she said. “Did you sew both pieces yourself?”

“I did.”

“I can tell.”

“How, vhenan?”

“Because the stitching is terrible.”

He laughed, closing the distance between them. Soon, he was right there. He plucked one of the pins from her hair, placed it between his teeth. “And I suppose that, being a _Dalish huntress from the Free Marches,_ you could do better?”

“Yes,” she said, “I could.”

“Well. One day, I’ll ask you to prove that to me,” he said. He moved his hands behind her, up the shirt, feeling the lengths and contours of her back.

“One day?” she said, closing her eyes, yielding.

“One day, vhenan.”

She had to get on her tip toes to kiss him. Things changed once their lips touched. She couldn’t help herself. She hung off of him, her body needy and unashamed. She fawned. “Is there time?” she said.

“That depends,” he said into her ear. He pulled the shirt, its wide neck, down the length of her arm. She felt his breath, then his mouth on her shoulder.

“On what?”

“On what you want.”

She could feel herself buckling. It had been forever since he’d just…taken her. She could tell—he felt it, too. She tried calculating how long it would be until the full army of one hundred or more Inquisition soldiers would be ready at the gates of Caer Bronach. Surely it would be a while? That’s what Cullen had said. But by the time she had reached any sort of conclusion, Solas already had her out of the shirt, and he’d pulled loose the drawstring at her waist.

“What do you want, vhenan?” he said. She felt him trace his mouth from the tip of her ear to the tip of her collar bone, making her shiver. On the subject of time, it seemed, he was deciding for them. Time did not matter.

She felt the need to be abrupt then. He wanted a direct answer, she could tell from his voice, and she did not wish to be vague or hazy or romantic that morning. She wanted _him_. And whatever he said or did, the truth was, that there was not much time. There was never enough. “Dispense with the foreplay," she said, grabbing him by the ears, peeling back her own self-consciousness, finding the animal beneath. “Just fuck me, Solas. Don't make me be patient this time.”

He smiled then. She could hear it in his voice. “The common language _is_ blunt, isn’t it, vhenan?” he said, a hand in her hair, pulling.

“Sometimes I need bluntness.”

So he discarded the pin from between his teeth, picked her up then, and he just took her, right there against the heavy, wooden door. It was what she wanted. She braced herself by hanging onto the doorjamb with both hands, her legs high around his waist. She had to use great deal of strength to keep up, to stay rooted against him. When he got tired of this, he tipped her over onto the bed where she teased him with her hand, touched herself, a maddening dare, and so he put her knees to her chin. He wanted her to feel him, deep, everywhere.

At this point, she had only two words, elvhen now, said them over and over. " _Elvar'el, Solas,"_ she pleaded. " _Solas, elvar'el_."

It was fast and good, high, frenzied and reckless, for both of them. " _Atisha,_ vhenan," he tried pleading with her as she urged him. At first, her eagerness had almost amused him, but his amusement quickly gave way to a very serious kind of compliance. When she said his name like that, over and over again, in the dialect, as the elvhen word that it was—It drew him so hard. He did as she asked. He worked, felt her go limp beneath him. And when finally it was done, there was a familiar calm, comfort. Low. Their cool, meticulous intimacy as they lie entangled in the bed sheets. That is when he asked to see the scar.

"Let me," he said, softly. He wanted to look at it, really look at it, up close. It was a part of her that had changed. A piece that was no longer missing, was only new, and he needed to adjust how she appeared in his memory. "There is still time."

"Okay," she said, and she turned onto her stomach so that he could find it, the odd, new crack in her skin, so that he could trace it with his fingers, then with his lips, the palm of his hand. She felt herself flutter, rise to his touch. This is what Solas did. He brought them high, then low. He studied. He memorized. But he also got carried away. It did not take long for him to become aroused again with his own odd sense of worship, and he turned her over and spread her knees, brought her way up high with only his tongue. Light, and slow. She had not been expecting this, and it did not take much. She came quickly, strongly, loudly, and once she was finished, pushed him onto his back to return the favor, only she went hard and fast, and this took him by surprise, and he latched to the back of her ears, pushing and pulling until she had drawn out every last bit he could muster. Afterward, they were both entirely ruined, exhausted, staring up at the carillon, thankful and unaware.

 

But still, all feasts must end, and now duty called. They hurried to clean up, to collect and steady themselves against the inevitable trials of a new day. Solas found her clothes buried in the bed sheets, handed them to her in a neat pile. Once she was dressed, she put out the fire and thought they were nearly ready to go.

“Make the bed first,” said Solas, adjusting the drawstring at his waist. He had one of her pins again, back between his teeth.

“Why?”

“Because it is ours,” he said.

Was this a promise? She couldn’t be sure. She made the bed anyway, and then she put her hair in her regular braids, and he helped her pin them up, away from her face and off of her neck, and together, they prepared for the long journey home, to Skyhold.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Elven Translations:
> 
> "Elvar'el, Solas," she pleaded. "Solas, elvar'el." - "Harder, Solas," she pleaded. "Solas, harder."
> 
> "Atisha, vhenan." - "Be calm, vhenan."


	15. Stand-off in the Arbor Wilds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Sene and Solas come to blows in the Arbor Wilds, Bull and Dorian must step in to make things right.

It was not a week later that they found themselves entrenched in full blown warfare in the Arbor Wilds. Sene had no idea it would be so crowded and so singularly violent. She’d never actually gotten to experience the full brunt of the Inquisition and its allies before. It was quite a spectacle. When she arrived, she was greeted by the Empress herself and was immediately and symbolically crowned and there was bowing and kneeling and so much pomp and circumstance, all of it pressed to the hailing landscape of fire and explosion, metal on metal and armors clanking—at first, she wasn’t quite sure how to approach the situation. It had been a while. But soldiers sparred in the distance. And all the while these great big colorful birds would flap and land in loud flocks, and it was warm out, and sticky, and the more time they spent, huddled around a makeshift war table, planning their attack, the more she felt…excited. She was eager, unfolding, fully charged.

Solas, however, was anxious. Touchy. He did not like Morrigan. Sene had tried convincing him the entire ride over that she was safe, that she could be trusted. Eventually, he gave in, but she knew it was only to appease her. After their time in Crestwood, it seemed the two had somehow grown even closer; however, he had serious concerns about the Arbor Wilds. Together with Bull and Dorian, they devised a plan that focused on magic and range. Sene was to keep to the walls, use traps whenever enemies got too close. It would be Red Templars all over again. This unnerved Solas, heavily.

“It’s a fight, Solas. We’ve done this a thousand times before,” she said, their plan in hand, as they were getting ready to head past the treeline. It was a private conversation. Bull and Dorian were nearby but out of earshot, and Morrigan was standing alone, studying the tip of her staff as if it held great meaning to her.

“Violence is never that simple, Isene,” said Solas, wrapping a piece of cloth around his right hand—a habit with him. She was getting sick of him saying her name like that. She hadn’t told him the story so that he could exploit it and make her feel like a child. “You should know that by now. You’re too eager.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“I can sense your excitement,” he said. “It’s strong. You long to bring the enemy to its knees, and that is an admirable quality for a leader, in theory. But this will be a long battle, and bloody, and it is sure to have a climactic ending. You need to pace yourself and to stick to the plan if we are to get through this alive.”

“I got it, Solas.” She shoved past him.

He took her by the arm, pulled her back. “Do you?” he said.

“Yes,” she said, stern, cold, swatting him off of her. “Will that be all?”

He simply stared at her, eyes of steel, then he straightened up and nodded. She walked past him, ready to go.

 

It’s not that she was trying to piss him off. She couldn’t help that her current state of mind ran in direct counter to his wishes. As they moved through the trees, uncovering violent encounter after violent encounter, Sene stepped in wherever she could, refused to keep her distance. Rather than use traps defensively, she planted them as bait, a dare, and she could feel herself making it personal with every single enemy she dispatched. More than once, she found herself standing side-by-side with the Iron Bull, blood staining the silk scarf at her throat. He said little, though she could tell he was surprised. She was outside of herself, thought her behavior to be impressive, dominant. Once they got to end of the first blockade, she’d hacked her way through three Red Templar marksmen by putting arrows in their throats at close range. She stepped over their bodies one by one, found herself in close quarters with a Shadow. Coming to blows, she had no time to nock an arrow in her bow. So she drew them two at a time and used them as tools instead, duel-wielding, sparring with the Shadow and his sharpened, red lyrium hands. She had to duck a lot, but she was on point, bringing every hit with precision, weakening him meticulously over time, death by a thousand cuts.

But she was not a tank or an assassin. She shouldn’t have been that close, and when Solas, fed up with her bravado, saw what was going on, he grabbed her by the collar and yanked her backward, hard, removing her from the fight. He, like Sene, was keyed up as high as it got, had not held back, and so the motion was violent, almost sending her straight to her ass. She swore as she caught herself against a tree. Solas didn’t notice. He garroted the Shadow till it was flat on its back, and then, standing directly over it, put the blade of his staff straight into its heart. The Shadow exploded into a thousand fragments of red lyrium. Solas merely watched, intent in the wake of the destruction he’d wrought. He looked around then, surfacing, realized the blockade had been cleared. Dorian and Morrigan stood at a safe distance. Bull was nursing a flesh wound to the thigh. This fight was over.

But then he turned all the way around and saw Sene. As soon as they made eye contact, she flew at him, shoving him with both hands, hard. He felt the force in his chest like a war hammer, staggered backward, and she was coming at him again now. More shoving. Then, the yelling.

“What the fuck?” she said.

“What the _fuck_?” he said, pushing her back. “What the _fuck_ is right. Are you so moronic? You’d risk your life—recklessly—for what? Is this revenge? Are you doing this simply to get to me?”

“Oh, _Solas_ ,” she said, enraged. “My bloody savior. I thought we got past this in Crestwood.”

 He shook his head. “This is not the same. You weren’t enacting a veritable death wish in Crestwood.”

“A death wish? You’re so dramatic.”

“Do not play this game, Isene. _No judin tel’enaste_.”

“ _Elithan ara paneth’en, Solas. No ma elithas su’em._ ”

He fussed at his gloves, his sleeves. It was a habit, a compulsion. She was getting under his skin. He couldn’t help it. “ _Nar elithast’en re delavir,_ ” he said. _“Irmes tel’solas._ ”

“You must be joking. _Ame solas’est?_ _Ane nar solas, Solas. Un’shalas em, y no ame nar tuathe._ ”

This bit him deep. _“_ This is not about me, Isene. _Or ara solas._ ”

“ _Sathan,”_ she mocked. _“Ghi’las em, ghi’len athim._ ”

He sounded bitter now, scolding. _“Mavas shem’el o’_ _alasmanvian’sal_ _un’etha sul'na.”_ Fists clenched at his sides, he shook his head, so deeply disappointed he didn’t know where to begin. He wanted to shame her. “ _Fenedhis, Isene. Laimas ara vhen’an. Da’len or’viane’enaste._ ”

“ _Da’len?_ ”

At this point, she dropped her bow, flew at him one last time, half-threw a punch, but he caught her and somehow managed to pin her arms to her sides. She was struggling, and strong as hell, and this was still all of that leftover bluster from the fight. He wouldn’t be able to hold her there for long.

Staring up at him now, her eyes bright and hot, she went on. "You’re so wise, _ha’hren_. How would you advise I drink from the offering you so humbly bestowed upon me? I am, after all, yours to instruct.”

“Mindfully,” he said, his voice loud, startling and deep. “With respect.” He shoved her body away from his. She pushed off in disgust.

It was a stand-off now. She was like one of her traps—spring-loaded, ready to pop. One of her braids had fallen down from its place atop her head, and she had a bit of blood at the corner of her mouth. She tasted it, looked down. Then, she screamed in his direction and turned her back, stormed away.

           

“Is this…typical for them?” said Morrigan.

“No,” said Bull, shaking his head, watching the fight unfold. “I mean—look. I’ve spent a lot of time with Sene and Solas on the battlefield. There are…power struggles. He thinks he knows what’s best for her. She doesn’t always agree. But I’ve never seen them…scrap. This should be interesting.”

“Should we step in?”

He laughed. “Leave them,” he said. “They are equals.”

“Can you understand what they’re saying?” said Dorian to Morrigan.

“Some,” she said. “Obviously, I lack much of the necessary context. Though this seems heavily rooted in the fact that he saved her life in the Emprise du Lion.”          

“Oh,” said Bull, sighing. “That. That is sensitive.”

“She feels that he’s…exercising too much will over her. She’s angry, obviously. He feels she’s being reckless. _Mavas shem’el…o’alasmanvian’sal…un’etha sul’na,_ ” she said, seeming to tune her ear, “translates to something like, _You drink hastily from the well of life I built for you._ ”

“Andraste’s tits,” said Bull, just as Sene flew at him one last time. “That’s deep.”

“Leave it to a couple of elves to use poetry amidst the throes of bitter argument,” said Dorian.

“Hey. What did he just say to make her try and deck him in the face?” said Bull.

“He essentially called her a _graceless child._ Or, maybe thankless. Something to that effect.”

“Oh, dear,” said Dorian.

Solas was coming toward them now, the staff swinging by his side. He dropped it once he was past them, started unwrapping and rewrapping the leather straps to his gloves for what seemed to be no reason at all. Bull, unthinking, passed him a canteen. Solas stopped fussing with his accessories and took it, hot from the fight and angry. Then, Morrigan made the mistake of speaking too soon.

“Shall we proceed to the next blockade?” she said. “Or is there more elvhen bickering to be had?”

Solas took a drink, swished the water around in his mouth, spat it out at her feet. “Witch,” he said, glaring, tossing the canteen and heading to the nearest tree, which he proceeded to hit, hard, open handed, shaking his head in frustration. This was not the Solas any of them was used to.

Morrigan was incredulous. Bull put a hand on her shoulder. “Yeeeeaaah,” he said. “See, Solas is really not a bad guy. But you have to know how to deal with him. For example, when he’s angry, just keep your mouth shut. Because he can be the worst kind of asshole.”

“Clearly,” she said.

“Well I suppose I should find the Inquisitor,” said Dorian. “I assume you’ll take the feral apostate? He likes you better than me.”

Bull grunted, once, not relishing the idea. “Don’t just fucking take her side,” he said. “You know as well as I do. Solas is a control freak, but she needs to calm her shit.”

“I am well aware of the nuances,” said Dorian, going on his way. “No need to coddle.”

“You stay here,” Bull said to Morrigan. “Keep watch.”

“As you wish, Iron Bull.”

He found Solas in a state of full blown rage. He was leaning against the tree with both hands, out of breath, chin to his chest, seething, frustrated. Bull picked up the discarded staff from the ground, held it by his side, and approached with caution, as he would a familiar but rabid dog.

“Hey, Solas,” he said. “You okay?”

Solas did not respond.

“Is—I mean, how’s it going with you two? Everything fine there?”

Again, the glaring. “You’ve seen it. All day, it’s been recklessness with her. Stupidity. Searching out the most immediate danger she can find and going straight to it. There’s much more at stake here than just us.”

“Hmm,” said Bull. “I see what you’re saying, and I…sort of agree. But I also have a question.”

“Of course you do.”

“How many ladies you been with in your time, Solas? I'm curious.”

Immediately, this broke the tension. Solas looked up at him, perplexed. “What?”

“Okay, fine. I get it. I don’t need a number. But I get the feeling it’s…pretty high.”

"Is this a serious conversation?"

“Look, don’t ask me how I know," said Bull. "Maybe it’s the apostate thing. Makes you seem like sort of a... _bad boy_. And the serving girls, you’ve got a way with them. Especially the elves. You can tell a lot about a man based on how he treats the serving girls. You get them fawning, let them win a little bit, while still maintaining a certain…authority. You’ve got an ease about you. You deal with women as if you’ve been there plenty of times before. Not all men have that. Take the Commander, for example. Sexy, smart, but any time he tries talking to a woman, he’s so terrified he ends up tripping over his own dick.”

Solas found himself just staring at the Iron Bull. He wasn’t sure how they’d gotten on this topic, but for whatever reason it was working. His anger released. Now, he just felt sort of pleasantly numb around the edges. It was almost transcendant. 

“You, though,” he went on, “you know the exact position of your dick at any given moment. How low it hangs, how it swings. You don't trip, Solas. You’re…smooth.”

“You've been spending too much time with Dorian, haven't you?" said Solas.

“Ha! You got me there,” said Bull, clapping him on the shoulder. “But seriously, Solas. There are _girls,_ and then there are…well, then there’s something else, isn’t there? I'm sure you've been in love before, but not like this. Not the kind of love that fucks you up in the head so hard you can’t tell your ass from your ear lobes. The kind that takes you by surprise? Am I right?”

Solas gave him a long, careful look. “You’re not wrong. Though I’d argue it isn’t quite that simple.”

“Maybe not,” said Bull. “Nothing really is with you. You’re mysterious, complicated. It’s part of your _bad boy_ mystique. But I’ve seen you in the midst of some pretty heavy shit, Solas. Heavy, heavy shit. Like, lover-dying-in-your-arms-heavy. Fucking ass Templars biting into your neck and your ankles in a wasteland of snow and red lyrium. I’ve patched your wounds. We fucking shared a tent for eight days straight. You get to know a man.”

“What is your point?”

“My point is, all that bullshit disappears when it comes to the Boss. I’ve seen you with her. You’re better that way. You’re not an idea or a persona anymore, or a symbol. You’re not a _bad boy._ Or whatever it is you might've once used to get your dick wet.”

Solas raised his eyebrows. “What am I, then?”

“You’re a _man_. You fucking breathe and bleed. You would risk your life to save your woman. I’d dare you to deny it, but I’m pretty sure that, on some level, you understand me.”

Solas began to dig the heels of his hands into his eyeballs. "I do," he said.

“You’re her mate," continued Bull. _"_ It’s primal, base, human. Or, _elf._ Whatever. It's just a metaphor. It’s passion. Love.” He beat his chest with his fist, grunted in earnest. “Start acting like it.”

Solas nodded, once. 

“I know she’s acting out right now," said Bull. "Maybe it’s the fact that she’s been on her ass for weeks and she’s finally got her swagger back. Maybe she really is trying to get under your skin. I don’t know. In any case, she’s got an ego going, and it’s dangerous. I’ll give you that. But quit pretending to be her advisor, or her keeper, or her fucking father. I don’t care if we’re on the battlefield or you’re fucking her upside down in the kitchens at Skyhold. Things are always going to be personal between you two. Quit denying it. That’s that only way you fix this.”

Solas kind of narrowed his eyebrows a little bit, smirked. “The kitchens?” he said.

“Ah. Maybe that was me. But you know what I’m saying.”

“I believe I do, yes,” he said, straightening up. “Where is Sene?”

“She’s, well—It may be a moment. Dorian’s taking care of it. She was pretty pissed off at you.”

“You think? She tried punching me in the face. She almost succeeded.”

“Ha! Well you should know better than to pull a redhead away from a kill like that. Pretty arrogant, even for your crazy ass.”

“She was being reckless.”

“Even still. She had him, and you know it. You were just worried, because she’s your woman. That’s normal. It was a Shadow. Just like at Suledin Keep, and I don’t blame you for…reacting. You hold your emotions in real tight, Solas, but I can see. I always know. I’m a fucking spy, remember?”

“Tal vashoth.”

“Hey. Here’s your staff. And be nicer to the witch from now on, okay? Or at least try to keep from spitting on her. We need her on our side if we’re going get through this.”

           

Sene had hidden herself inside an abandoned tent nearby. Red and brand new. She hated it.

Dorian came inside then, looking dashing, confident, concerned. He had his hands clasped together, as if in prayer. “Sene,” he said.

She didn’t answer. Instead, she kicked at a bit of dirt on the ground and crouched all the way down to the floor, let her head hang between her knees.

“How are you?” said Dorian.

“I’m great,” she said. She was being mean. It was on purpose. “What do you want, Dorian?”

“Only to talk, friend.”

She was still on fire. She’d left her bow out on the battlefield, felt naked without it. She felt a bit faint, and now, she also felt guilty. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just—he’s really pissing me off.”

“I’m going to say something,” said Dorian, “and you’re not going to like it.”

She plopped down onto the ground, started drawing shapes in the dirt: an eye, a staff, a shield. Dorian sat down across from her, doing his best not to sully the silk of his armors. “Fine,” she said.

“You’re acting…you seem more aggressive than usual today,” said Dorian. “I don’t mean to say you’re typically a passive warrior. That would be far from the truth. I just mean—you’re usually more careful than this. One does not typically find you, our fearless leader and holy Dalish archer, up close and personal with Red Templars. At least not on purpose.”

“He was taunting me,” said Sene.

“Ah. So the enemy’s been taunting you all day, has it?”

“What?”

“You’ve not been following your own strategies, Sene.”

“My _strategies?_ ”

“You’ve been charging where it is your duty to flank. At one point, when you were supposed to be on the wall, I saw you trounce a Grey Warden from above, take a small hunting dagger from a sheathe at your thigh, and stick it into his eye socket. Does that seem strategic to you?”

She seemed to recognize what he was saying then, put her face in her hands and shook her head. “I know,” she said. “That was stupid.”

“Indeed, it was.”

“I—I just feel like I need to do something, you know?” She looked up at him.

“I think I get it, yes.”

“I’ve been so helpless. Now that I’m back, it’s been hard to…contain myself. And Solas—” Just the mention of his name exasperated her.

“What about Solas?” said Dorian.

“He should not have done that,” said Sene. “It was more dangerous for him to pull me out of that fight than it would have been for me to just finish off the Shadow myself. I _had_ him.”

“Even if that’s true,” said Dorian, “can you imagine what Solas must have seen? You sparring with a Shadow. It couldn’t have been easy for him.”

“You’re saying he merely reacted?”

“That is exactly what I’m saying.”

“But it was stupid. And based on—based on his need to protect the second chance that he gave me or something. He’s so—he’s just always so focused on me, on maximizing strategies that emphasize my _survival_ above all else.”

"Solas? Worried about your survival? Can you blame him?”

“He knows I hate chivalry. Usually, he hates it, too.”

“Your life is somewhat of a cherished commodity around here, Sene. I’m not sure it takes a chivalrous man to see that.”

“I just—I wish he hadn’t done it.”

“Forgiveness,” said Dorian. “The man loves you. He can’t see straight all of the time.”

“Solas knows what’s at stake here. He always _sees straight_.”

“Oh, Sene. Self-deception does not look good on even your delicate features. Certainly you know that isn’t true. Especially after what happened with your injury. He’s not the man he once was.”

“If we’re going to win, I need him to be the level-headed rift mage he’s supposed to be,” she said. “I need him to be focused.”

“Oh, really?” said Dorian. “Is that all you need him for?”

“I need—” she stopped, thought hard.

“You’re still in the mind of a warrior, Sene,” he said. “You’re thinking like a leader. That’s grand. But it’s no longer enough. You and Solas have complicated matters. It is no longer obvious what must be said or done in any given situation. Love makes things unpredictable. And while it’s not what anyone expected, and it’s not always ideal—like now!—it is reality, and I think most can agree that it has, for the most part, proven to be a good thing. The two of you fight harder and better when you’re together. As long as you’re not…doing this. You _must work together._ You must talk to him, Sene. You cannot be punching him in the face when there are demons to kill. Understand?”

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

“Good!” said Dorian. He got up then, one foot at a time and helped her to her feet. “That went more smoothly than I expected.”

“I was mad,” said Sene, “A lot of it was the fight, though. No kill. I was— _gah._ "

“Well, yes. That makes sense,” said Dorian. "Though you did go after him pretty hard."

"It was just bluster leftover from the fight. I knew he wouldn't let it get too far. I _know_ him.”

"Ah, well. Of course. Equals.”

"We train together," she said. "Practice. Don't you and Bull?"

"I'm not sure we're quite there yet," he said, "though I have taught him to appreciate magic in ways he hadn't previously understood."

"That's nice," she said. "Solas shows me magic sometimes, too."

Dorian sighed. "Perhaps this is proof that there _is_ someone for everyone, Inquisitor, even where you least expect to find it."

"Perhaps."

 

When they got back to the initial field of battle, dead Templars strewn like red rocks to the grave, she saw Solas, leaning against a tree, holding her bow with both hands. He stared at her, intent, as he always did. Calm now, focused, handsome. He straightened up as she approached him, his face soft, and handed her the bow. She examined its markings, pretty carvings in the shapes of hallas. Small things.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

He put his hands on hers where she held to the wood, let his fingers graze to her knuckles, her palms. His touch, so soft, was electric, bringing everything into focus. He always knew exactly how to touch her, exactly what she needed in any given moment. It was maddening, addictive. It was everything.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I’m sorry, too,” she said.

He held her wrists now between them, as she held the bow, his thumbs pressing into her skin. “I saw the Shadow. I made a choice.”

“Solas, I know.”

“I just—I need you to consider others, Sene,” he continued. “Consider me. When you make decisions on the battlefield, remember you are more than just a warrior.” She looked down to where his hands held hers, but he let go, raised her chin with just the tip of his finger, met her eyes. “ _Ara avise’ain."_

She found herself lost in his gaze, the grays and the purples and the deep, far away sadness that she could not touch, but it was all she could do to try. “I won’t be so reckless anymore, okay?"

He smiled, relieved. “Okay,” he said. “And I will remember our roles. I will try not to be so hasty. I am not your keeper. I am _not_ your father.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“But I will always protect you,” he said, and he was very serious now. “It is not chivalry. If anything, it is selfishness. _Aman na, ahnsul amas ara lath’in. Ara vhen’an._ This I cannot change."

She thought she heard a note of regret in his voice. It was small, but certain, as if he wished that all of it were not so. As if he were finally admitting some great, irreversible truth that would change their lives forever. She didn’t care. She forgot quickly. Far gone, she dropped the bow to the grass, hooked her arms around his neck, got onto her tip toes, and kissed him. Deep. He held her tight, and she collapsed her body into his, the familiar shape and size of it, the warmth, catching her. She pressed his back into the tree. They were going…going…

“Nice.”

It was Bull.

Solas broke the kiss. Sene, however, she was unbreakable. Little flame. She looked up at him with sleepy eyes, still surfacing. She would have taken him right there if she could.

“Time to go,” he said, tucking the fallen braid between his thumb and his forefinger.

She took a deep breath, collected herself. “Yes. You're right.”

"Turn around," he said. She did so without hesitation. She smiled at Dorian, mouthed to him, _thank you,_ as Solas folded the braid back into its rightful place and adjusted the pin.

“Does that feel right?” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Now, may we proceed?” said Morrigan. “I think I can hear an entire army of Chevaliers sighing as we stand here, watching the two of you make up.”

“We can proceed,” said Sene. “Let’s go.”

“Sorry about the spitting incident,” said Solas.

“Ah, well. I apologize, too. I spoke out of turn.”

He bent down to pick up Sene’s bow and handed it to her. “Yes, you did.”

With Sene and Solas off ahead now and Morrigan trailing behind them, Dorian felt Bull’s hand, softer than usual, form to the back of his neck. He turned around, looked up into his massive lover’s eyes. A warmth there, he saw. A profound and growing affection.

“There’s still a lot of fighting to do,” said Bull. “Don’t do anything stupid. Got it?”

Dorian put his own hand on Bull’s wrist. Tugged at it a little, out of habit, always trying to get at the soft underneath all the hard. It was there this time, waiting. He let the feeling unfold, surround him, as expensive silk. “I won’t if you won’t,” he said.

“You’ve got a deal, kadan.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FULL TRANSLATION OF SENE AND SOLAS'S FIGHT (get a full breakdown in my my work The Dead Season: Full Elvhen Translations): 
> 
> “Do not play this game, Isene. It will not end well.”
> 
> “I choose my battles, Solas. Not you.”
> 
> “Your choices make no sense. They’re dripping with pride.”
> 
> “You must be joking. I'm prideful? You are your pride, Solas. You saved my life, but I am not your creation.”
> 
> This bit him deep. “This is not about me, Isene. Or my pride.”
> 
> “Then please,” she mocked. “Explain it to me, humble teacher.”
> 
> He was bitter now, scolding. He wanted to shame her. “You drink hastily from the well of life I built for you.” Fists clenched at his sides, he shook his head, so deeply disappointed he didn’t know where to begin. “Fuck, Isene. You waste my love. Thankless child.” 
> 
> “Child?”
> 
>  
> 
> THE REST:
> 
> “Ara avise’ain." - "My little flame."
> 
> "Aman na, ahnsul amas ara lath’in. Ara vhen’an." - "I protect you because you are the keeper of my heart. My heart lives within you."


	16. Show Me Something, Pt. 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Solas has a bad reaction to what happens on the bridge with Corypheus. When Dorian is injured, Sene must make a difficult decision.

Once inside the sanctum, the dire beauty of it all made very little sense. The confusion—it was raw and black instead, as the incident with Corypheus had drawn them deep into the night and torn their plan to pieces. The moon watched from overhead, a bright eye. When they’d lost Samson, his army was down to hardly anything at all, limbs hanging off of them like sad, red puzzle pieces of despair. Sene was not worried about him, but the run across the bridge had been so reckless, so fast and unthinking, she realized only once the doors were closed and sealed that she hadn’t had time to take attendance, and she was struck now with a fistful of fear deep in the pit of her stomach as she looked around, terrified at what she would or would not see. Dorian had taken a bad burn to his left shoulder during the last push to get to the Temple. He was in a lot of pain, but the wound wasn’t life-threatening, and Bull was there with him, attentive, fully intact and talking him through it. Morrigan was alone, standing, staring down at her hands as if wracked with a tremendous guilt. But Sene did not see Solas. Deep, nausea hooked into her guts, gnawed, split, and she almost lost her balance.

“Solas,” she said, cried out. The moonlight, it seemed to be everywhere. Like costume, a watchful mask on the greenery. She looked back to the door.

“Boss!” It was Bull, seeming to read her mind. “He’s over there.”

She saw where he pointed. The relief crushed her, like being ripped through time.

He sat, collapsed at the foot of the long and tangled roots of a very old tree, his knees up, his head hanging in his hands, staff in the grass by his side. He was sort of hidden there, amidst tufts of ancient orange flowers that bobbed and sang in the breeze, and he looked completely, utterly distraught. She ran to him, fell to her knees before him, the flowers kissing her knuckles. She put her hand on his back. He didn’t seem to notice her at first, just shook his head over and over. Terrified, she scanned his body, relentless, for injury—the back of his head, his neck, his chest and his back, she held him there. But it was all just on the surface—scratches, bruises. He’d lost a glove, and his hand was bloodied up, but he seemed okay. This was not physical.

“Solas?” she said. “Solas, what’s wrong?”

He was speechless. “It’s dark.”

“Solas,” she said. She positioned herself before him, shook him by the shoulders, gently at first, then harder when he wouldn’t respond. She didn’t see any other way. “ _Vhenan. Vegaras su’em._ ”

With this, a calm focus, changing. She could feel it—his muscles, releasing beneath her hands. He looked up at her. He grabbed her face with both hands. She grabbed hold of his wrists.

“ _Ame amahn_ ,” he said, getting ahold of himself. “Sene, I’m sorry.”

“Tell me what’s wrong.”

“He has achieved immortality?” said Solas, shaking his head. “I had not counted on that.”

“None of us did,” she said.

But he did not respond to this. He was staring at her now, almost as if he did not know her, or as if it had been an eternity since he last saw her. It was not entirely unlike him. Solas was so dreamy, and he had this way of being outside himself, of her and of them, and then reentering the very moment it became too much for her to bear. But with everything that had happened, right then, it scared her now. She put her hand on his face. This softened him, a little at first. Then more. Then, as if he had only just realized where they were, what was going on, who she truly was, he returned to her. His presence now, intense and fully formed. Almost tangible. He closed his eyes, put his hand on hers where it rested on his cheek, exhaled, and leaned forward until their foreheads touched.

“You're safe,” he said.

“So are you,” she said.

He kissed her firmly on her forehead and they stayed there like that for a while. He had calmed. Though she still worried, she felt so deeply cherished. Her heart a mere prayer, a melody.

“Dorian is hurt,” she said.

“Is it bad?”

“I don't know. I think we need to make camp.”

“We do not have much time.”

“I know,” she said. “But Samson has hardly any army left. They will not be able to proceed without regrouping. And whatever those elves are, they are protecting this place. There is magic here. I can feel it, Solas. It waits for…for _us._ Samson will not succeed, but we will not either in our current condition. We need time.”

At this, the mention of magic, Solas tugged her head back a little so that he could look her in the eye. He studied her then, curious and proud. “Do I sense a new and deepening elven wisdom in you?” He smirked.

“Maybe,” she said.

“Let us not tell Sera.”

She shoved him a little, smiled, felt her face grow warm. She was blushing. “I have learned a lot from your stillness, _ha’hren._ ”

“My stillness?”

“Yes,” she said.

She kissed him, fast but deep. He sighed as their lips parted. “Please do not call me _ha’hren,_ ” he said. “It makes me feel very old.”

“You are old.”

“Everyone is old compared to you,” he said, smiling. “But I am not that old.”

“How old are you?”

Morrigan came over then, interrupting, though she seemed timid. “Inquisitor,” she said. “It is time to discuss how we shall proceed.”

Sene looked at Solas who nodded.

“We need to make camp,” she said. “We’ll proceed at first light, or whenever Dorian is able.”

“First light?”

“Yes.”

“But—if I may, Inquisitor.”

“You may.”

“With Samson up ahead, are you absolutely certain this is the best course of action?”

“We don’t have a choice,” said Sene.

Morrigan glanced to Solas. “You advise this?”

“I do,” he said, glaring. “We are depleted. We must regroup.”

“But if Samson reaches this Well of Sorrows before we do,” she said, “there is no telling—”

“The Boss is right,” said Bull. He’d had to remove half Dorian’s armor, peel it back. The burn, Sene saw, was a great, blackened ring right at the corner of the shoulder. It looked very painful. Dorian himself looked out of breath, pale, lifting his head from its place upon Bull’s chest. “Samson and his boys were pretty banged up, and with an entire army of mystery elves fucking up everybody’s shit, they’ll know better than to go charging unprepared. Same with Corypheus. This battle isn’t over. They know that as well as we do. ”

“That being said,” said Dorian. Bull grunted, disapprovingly. "Oh, shush. This is my injury, not yours. And forgive me, Sene. But if it’s time we don’t have, just go. Leave me here. I'll be all right."

“What?” said Sene.

“I would not blame you.”

“Shut up, Dorian.”

“Excuse me?”

“No one is being left behind.”

"Well—"

“She's right,” said Solas, calm. “Per Bull’s assessment, the elves defending this place will not go lightly. They will outnumber Samson, and the Red Templars were ragged upon leaving us behind. Certainly even said defiled beasts require rest and rehabilitation after a fight as violent as the one we just endured.”

“How will we camp?” said Morrigan. “Pitch a tent? Light a fire in the inner sanctum of the Temple of Mythal?”

“Why not?” said Sene.

Morrigan gazed hard into her fingernails in the moonlight. “Just seems crude, ‘tis all. What will we do if they decide to return, or should Corypheus manage to catch up?”

Sene looked at Solas. He was suddenly absent, preoccupied with her knuckles, as if they were totally new to him. He had taken to kneading them gently between his own fingers. “Solas,” she said.

“Yes, vhenan?”

“Can you—is there a spell? A way to hide us here? Just in case?”

He looked up from where he’d been taken with her hand, thought on it, seeming to feel through his own elegant mind, the millions of layers and how they twisted, one by one. “There might be something I can do.”

“Good,” said Sene. “Whatever you come up with, just do it now.”

           

Sene built the fire herself. It was hard keeping out of the way of all the flowers, which grew tall with their open mouths. Morrigan had wandered off, took to examining the many murals painted in such an ancient setting by torchlight. Bull sat beyond the fire, mixing a simple poultice from elfroot and something sticky. Dorian rested against him, a great heavy weight, the armors completely removed from him now. He wore nothing to cover his chest, and the humidity of the Arbor Wilds made it easy for all of them to let down a little, get rid of their heavier layers. Nobody feared an ambush. Solas had done something. Sene wasn’t sure what, and she didn’t ask. It was an illusion, sort of like he’d turned the Fade inside out. Like everything with him, it was mysterious and complex. Still, using this, and using her intuition about the magic of the temple, Sene had bestowed a great deal of reassurance upon them all. They kept their armors close, their weapons closer. It was a great, dark field inside the sanctum. The walls were solid, and the spires swelling into the stars, enchanted and severe.

Sene and Solas lie beside one another, propped into the great, splayed roots of a tree—far from the fire and out of sight. They’d only just sexed, quickly and without regret. After their fight in the Wilds, and Solas's reaction to what had happened on the bridge, it had been necessary, almost a means to an end, a moment of forgiving and communion. They lie naked in the heat of the sanctum, unconcerned and removed, holding hands and looking up at the great, white moon. Sene put her chin into his shoulder. Her hair had gotten big with the huidity. Solas had undone her braids carefully, and now he nestled his chin to them, breathing deep. Perhaps it was the temple itself, but Sene felt imbued with a kind of majesty, as if she were a queen. She knew it was silly, but she did not care.

Then, Solas.

“Sene," he said. He sounded wistful, serious. He rarely said her name like that, like he had something to tell her. Especially not after sex. That’s when he tended to be at his sleepiest, his dreamiest.

“What is it, Solas?”

He hesitated. This worried her. He put his arm around her instead, pulled her into chest and touched his face to the nest of her hair. She could hear his heartbeat, elevated, only just. 

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“Nothing is wrong, vhenan.”

“Solas?” She turned in his arms to face him. “Don’t do that."

“Do what?”

“Pretend. Tell me what's going on.”

He took a very deep breath, one hand tangled deep inside her curls. “It will worry you.”

“I’m already worried.”

He sighed, heavy. He placed his lips to her forehead. “This is about the beginning," he said. "I'm sorry."

"What do you mean?"

He shifted so that he could wrap his arms all the way around her, draw her naked body into his. She felt his angles, his many slippery surfaces, all of it so intimate and secure. He was trying to make her feel safe. "The first day I came to you," he said, "after the Breach.”

" _That_ beginning?"

“First,” he said, “know that I had certain...I was fucked-up, Sene. I was alone.” She tried to straighten so that she could see his face, but he would not let her. He went on. “I was different. I thought I could go back, but I couldn't.”

“What are you talking about, Solas."

“Sene, listen to me," he said. 

"I'm listening."

"Corypheus achieving immortality was unexpected," he said. "When I saw what _we_ saw on the bridge, it all came back. Me, everything I was. Before you. That is why I reacted the way that I did.”

Sene did not know what to say. He was holding her so tightly now. It was almost as if he was worried she’d disappear, or float away. “What happened to you?” she said. “Why were you so alone?”

“Don't worry about me, vhenan.”

“I’m not a child,” she said now, finally wresting herself from his grasp. Her strength, as usual, surprised him. He let go. She propped up to her elbow so that she was above him, and so that she could see his whole face. “You can tell me.”

“I know,” he said. “Believe me. And ever since _us_ , please understand that I have kept nothing from you in the way of my intentions. I have _not._ " He looked away, shook his head as if he were trying to convince himself and not her. It was all too familiar.

His speechlessness. It was becoming more common, something worrisome she had begun to count on. She was not sure what caused it, how a man like Solas could so quickly find himself without words. “It’s okay,” she said. 

He found her eyes, touched a thumb to her chin. She could feel him unraveling. “You have changed things,” he said. “I have given things to you, Sene. Things I didn't thought I could. Because of this, I am happy.”

“That’s good,” she said, trying to smile.

“Yes,” he said. “But I am not ready to talk about certain parts of my past. Maybe some day. But not now, not here.”

She put her hands on his chest, felt his body. It was long and firm, like hers, a warrior. She then moved her hands up the length of his neck to feel the hard angles of his jaw, where the mandible dipped and rose. The muscles were tight. He watched her closely, earnestly, frightened of whatever it was she would say to him next. She could feel it, deep inside her. The power to destroy him, to drive him away. As an ordeal, it was terrifying. She still remembered the Fade, his darkness, his raw power—so much of which seemed untapped, or hidden away. It was a side he did not show to her often, never by choice, but it was very, very real.

Now, in the sanctum, his eyes were dark with no light to fill them. But she knew he was not lying to her. Perhaps the truth was more complicated than she wanted to believe, but this, this was not a lie. "I get it," she said.

"Thank you," he said.

She curled into him deeply, but he rolled to his side so they could face each other. He still had a hand in her hair, and she still had a hand on his jaw. He closed his eyes, but she was watchful, attuned, worried. They lie like that for a while, knees touching. She felt like he might turn to a raw, magical vibration and hum from existence. But then, she felt him relax, and she felt him grow calm beneath her touch. The wilting of his body reassured her that he needed her. She needed him, too. But she also needed to say something, to break the silence of the moment, or else they might lose it. She was not ready to sleep.

Because sleep with Solas was not just sleep. It was distance and longing, forgetting. And she was not ready to give him up, not to the night, not to the Fade, not yet. He was _hers._ Of this, she was sure.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Elven Translations:
> 
> "Vegaras su’em.” - "Come back to me."
> 
> “Ame amahn." - "I am here."


	17. Show Me Something, Pt. 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hidden deep, Sene and Solas connect in the sanctum. At the fire, their companions wait in earnest. Magical instruction, with Solas. Feelings with the Iron Bull, as usual.

“It feels so strange to be here,” said Sene. “At the Temple of Mythal.”

He pressed his closed lips to her forehead, his voice low and unraveled to grit. “I agree.”

“I want to know you better,” she said.

He sighed. “Be still, vhenan.”

This made her smile. There he was, teaching her stillness. Still.

"Please, Solas?” she said anyway. “All this. Tell me something.”

“Tell you what?”

“Anything. About you.”

“Well,” he said, “let’s see. I like cake. I like you. I hate tea.”

Sene laughed. “I know that stuff. More.”

“You always want more. I can tell you’re getting at something. Tell me what you want to know."

She touched his brow, smiled, and placed her hand on the barrel of his rib cage as he faced her. He was playing with her hair, little pieces of it in his fingers, between them.

“When we first met,” she said—she felt his chest rising, falling, “you said you had a sort of plan. I don’t care about that. And I won’t bring up your past, not now. But what I do care about—you looked after me as I slept that first night. You studied the mark.”

“That is true,” he said.

“What did you think of me then?”

“What did I think of you?”

“Yes. That entire night you spent by my side. What were you thinking?”

She felt then, his hand moving up the length of her side, then to her back, and across the scar. His touch lingered there, as it so often did. Like he was reminding himself. “I thought about a lot of things.”

“But what did you think most of all.”

“I thought you were young,” he said. “I saw your braids and your freckles. _She’s just a girl_ , I thought to myself.”

“A girl?”

"Yes.”

“And what do you think of me now?”

“You are not what I expected. That is for certain _._ ” He reached his hand down to pick up her leg then, firming it around his body. He drew her closer, used his strength to press them into one another. “I don't want to talk,” he said. “Show me something, _avise’ain._ ”

This amused her, surprised her. That was her line. “Show _you_ something?”

“Yes.”

“What can I show you?”

“Something real." He smirked.

“Is that what I am to you?”

“Yes.”

With this, she did not hesitate. Imbued with a new sense of urgency, excitement, she climbed on top of him, and she leaned forward so that he could feel her hair tickling his face, and she kissed his eyes, each one, then his mouth. Then the high, freckled arches of his cheekbones, then the ears and the neck. Lower now, she found the hollow dips above the collar bones. His chest. And then, she looked up, and she made sure he was watching her closely, curious. She boldly ran her tongue the length of her hand, and she reached down and held him tight, watched him close his eyes, felt him yield and grow hard once more. She listened as he exhaled, and when she put her head to his chest she could hear his heartbeat again, faster now. Faster.

“This is real,” she said.

“Yes, it is, _da'len_." He was joking now. A relief, that they could get back to this place.

She tugged him harder until he groaned. “I’m not a _da’len_ ,” she said.

He had one hand on each of her shoulders, sort of bracing her against him. “I know that, Sene,” he said, breathing deep. “I knew it from that time we talked at Haven. When you yelled at me about the Dalish.”

She sped up, again. “I never yelled.”

This made him laugh, though he was losing it, too, all that breath in his voice between the laughing. She took a moment to relish the fact that only she could draw these things out of him, these noises, this rare and honest pleasure. “You yelled, _avise’ain_ ," he said, "and you called me _ha’hren,_ much like you did earlier today.” He ran his hands up and down the length of her arms, spoke softly, deeply. “It was an insult. I became curious.”

“Just curious?” she said.

He laughed, again.

She released him then, just for a moment, then crawled up and positioned him inside her. She heard the breath leave his body all at once as she lowered, slow and made him wait a little bit. He brought his hands down to her hips. His hands, big, rough as canvas, as stone. She felt him growing impatient. But he had asked her to show him something real. This, bringing him out of his comfort zone, his _stillness,_ seemed one way of doing that.

“How old are you?” she said, rocking slightly now, drawing a low, subtle grunt from somewhere deep at his center. “I asked you that before, but you never answered.”

“ _Avise’ain_ ," he said. "No more questions."

“Tell me,” she said, soft now, earnest, leaning down to bring her face close to his. “I deserve to know.”

He opened his eyes, becoming present. He smiled. “Does it matter?”

“No,” she said, still rocking, only just. “But I want to know anyway. You know how old I am. You can smell it, or whatever. It’s not fair.”

“It is not a _smell_ , vhenan. That was Sera being Sera.”

“You know what I mean," she said, speeding up, then slowing down, feeling him tense beneath her. "Tell me.”

“I’m thirty years old,” he said.

She tilted back then, pressed her hips forward until she could feel him, all the way, deep, pressing to a familiar angle that she was still figuring out. It was new and strange. It made her feel very good. "That's all?" She barely managed the words.

He smiled, eyes closed now. “Are you disappointed, vhenan?”

She shook her head. “No.”

She brought her face down and kissed him hard. She picked up speed, felt him quicken to her, a growing excitement, his hands in her hair. It’s where they always went when she could feel him beginning to break, like really break, buckle, his breath short and broken, she stopped, abruptly, and cupped her hands to his cheeks. His eyes fell open, lazy and cool. He was flushed and warm. She grinned, and he grinned back.

“You're teasing,” he said, bemused, as she kissed his eyes once more, kissed his ears, kissed his forehead and his eyebrows and his lips. “You do not usually tease me like this.”

“I’m trying something new. You don’t like it?”

“I do,” he said. “I do. But we are in a place of sanctuary. Have mercy, vhenan.”

“Okay,” she said, smiling with her lips at the cut of his jaw. “ _Ju’lanastan sul’na_.” Then, she began: the slow, beautiful movements of their lovemaking. How it could be both soft and miraculously deep, the moonlight spilling over them, into them. They groped, intense, feeling through the darkness, searching out the core of their love. Would they find it?

Solas asked himself this over and over that strange, strange night, with Sene on top of him here in the sanctum of the Temple of Mythal, pressing him into the earth as tattered roots. She could really take hold of him, he was learning, make him understand and grow, make him a man. Make him brave. And in the throes of all this, he forgot. He had forgotten. Everything. She made him forget everything. Everything but her, and the life they shared, and all that could be. He saw a pitcher of water on a wooden table top. The flower box full and aware with life. He smelled lilac and rosemary, and she was there in the kitchen, her hair down and long, the curls so red. She was exciting and courageous, untainted, her mortal hands guiding him toward a great, unnerving circle.

“ _Solas_?” she said, in the dialect, losing her breath. It was fast now. She was above him, her hand braced to the tree as he held her firmly by the hips, doing most of the work himself, his hips lifting off the grass. Her body sweaty and warm, collapsing, and so excruciatingly wet. He was dizzy. He was very close.

“ _Dirthas, vhenan_.”

“ _Ara vhen’an,_ ” she said. She, too, seemed lost to the moonlight and the elven magic of the sanctum. Is that was this was? Filling them with promises. “ _Isalan lana ara’lan_ _or'sil’dun’sal, su’na,_ ” she went on. “ _Gaelathe. Sathan lanas em._ ” Her eyes were closed. She was pure gone, to ecstasy. Had she read his mind?

" _Re gen’adahl esayas i’em, vhenan? Arulin’sil?”_ he said.

“ _Isalan ama dir'vhen’an i’na, Solas._ ”

With this, he felt it. The ruining swell, the release, and though there was not much left, he came with an intense ferocity, even for him, and he felt her clench around him, drawing him deeper still. When it was done, they were both so worked up, it took them a long time to find the earth again, to be calm. As always, he found stillness first. And she followed. She clung to him, this pretty, red-haired creature, her face ravaged to his chest. He wanted to hold her, so he did. He wanted to be with her, so he was. There was just so little left to remind him of the time before. Before her—what had it been? A far away dream now, here, on the forest floor, or deep in the stark and reckless jaws of denial.

But is it denial if it’s true? Some would accuse him of lying to himself, to her. But he did not feel in denial. He was sure. She made it all real. Is that a lie? She made him happy, whatever that was. Is. He was earnest and filled to the brim, and in that moment, he knew that she had made things seem different somehow. Brought it meaning. In all truth, for a time, Solas’s mind had earnestly changed.

 

“I don’t see them,” said Dorian. “Anywhere.”

Bull had packed the scorching wound in his shoulder with a mighty poultice, and he was forcing him to drink a lot of water. It was working, Dorian could feel it. The strength returning. He would be okay.

“Solas is working his mojo,” said Bull. “They had a hard day. Let them be.”

“Yes, fine,” said Dorian. “I have no problem with elven make-up sex in a temple sanctum by the light of the moon. That is the way of our world, so it seems. But where the bloody hell are they? They were right over there just a moment ago, and now—”

“They’re hidden, I suspect,” said Morrigan. “It seems Solas has doubled down on his own illusion spell. The two of them are beyond even our detection.”

“Nice,” said Bull. “Hey, Dorian. Maybe you could get Solas to teach it to you. This…spell.”

Dorian sighed. “As much as I hate to admit it, I’m afraid that Solas’s mastery of the Fade and its many illusory qualities is outside even my particular talents. I can, however, make time appear to pass more slowly than it actually does. He can’t do that, I don’t think. Anyway, let me know if that’s something that interests you.”

“Oh, it interests me,” said Bull. “I wonder what we could do with that. Any suggestions?”

“No,” said Dorian.

“Morrigan?”

She leaned back with her elbows in the grass, sighing in profound exasperation. “Do you have any idea what it’s like being the fifth wheel on a wagon so profoundly bizarre as this one?“  

“No,” said Bull, happily, “But I’ve got to admit, it’s probably pretty weird.”

“Probably,” said Morrigan, “would be an understatement.”

It was then that they appeared, the two of them, tall, lean figures coming out of the darkness, fully dressed, holding hands.

“Speak of the devil,” said Dorian. “I see the two of you have decided to once again grace us with your magical presence?”

“Sorry,” said Sene. “How long were we gone?”

“Oh, long enough,” said Dorian. But then, he noticed her hair. She’d left it down. He’d never seen it like that before. “Sene. Your hair.”

“What?” she said, placing a self-conscious hand on top of her head.

“No, friend. Leave it. It’s positively glorious. Like a great, unruly mane. You are ferocious. You should wear it like that more often.”

“I agree,” said Solas.

“It’s huge,” said Sene. “You’re both crazy.”

“So, you guys good?” said Bull, polishing his great sword with a blue handkerchief, the sweat prominent on his brow. The question was really directed toward Solas, a kind of continuation of their discussion back in the Arbor Wilds.

“Yes," said Solas, taking Sene to the fire where the two of them sat, side by side, elbows resting on their knees. “We’re good.”

“Not to change the subject or anything,” said Dorian. “But Solas, I've been meaning to ask you."

"Yes?"

"About this spell you cast on the sanctum. I must say. It's quite impressive. Even for you.”

"I must agree," said Morrigan. "I have not seen this particular trick before. It is rather useful."

“Thank you. It is not actually that complicated. Though it won’t hold forever.”

“Do tell, if you will," said Dorian. "How does it work?”

Solas plucked an orange flower from the grass, studied it. “Were the Red Templars to join us in the sanctum right now,” he said, “they’d see only a repetitive continuation of the setting, as it is projected in their minds.”

Dorian studied him closely, as did Morrigan. Bull held little interest in what Solas had to say, but he did smile at Sene who looked sleepy and unaware. Solas nudged her though. He gave her the flower, which made her blush. She sniffed at it once, put her heavy head on his shoulder.

“Think of it as a living memory," said Solas, cupping his hands to one of her knees, absentminded, loving, practiced. "Only simpler. Though what they see could also be predicated on simple expectations. It does not matter. The spell works either way, because it would be impossible for them to predict the sanctum's actual gradients and unfoldings as they appear beyond those memories and expectations. Those gradients and unfoldings are endless. Our existence, in its very essence, is random. So I've hidden those gradients. Or, more precisely, I've folded them in on themselves. Instead of us, they’ll see only what they can predict in their minds. It is generic."

Dorian stared at him, curiously. “That actually sounds quite complicated, Solas. I won’t lie.”

“I have done a poor job explaining," said Solas, lighthearted. "But I assure you, Dorian. With a little time and the right instruction, you could figure it out.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” said Dorian.

“As you should.”

“Aw, the two of you,” said Bull. “Talking magic, making friends. That’s what this is all about.”

“Is this not about stopping Corypheus?" said Morrigan. "Confusion finds me, yet again."

“Hey, I’m having a moment here," said Bull. "Try not to shit all over it. In a couple of hours, we’re going to enter that Temple and start killing things again. But for now, we’re _feeling_ things.”

This made Sene laugh. She joked, “I suspect you’re _feeling_ left out, Morrigan? I’m sorry.”

“I don’t so much feel _left out_ , Inquisitor, as I do curious,” she said. “How the four of you manage to find such balance between heart, groin, and sunder, I’ll never know. But I must admit, despite today’s…adventures, it does bring me hope.”

“Ah-ha!” said Bull, letting his sword clank to the dirt, the noise startling her a little bit. “There it is. _Feelings._ How did that feel, Morrigan?"

“I suppose it was not so bad,” she said, scratching at the back of her head. "I am fully capable of feeling things, Iron Bull. I'm just out of my element, is all."

"I know," said Bull. "I'm only yanking your chain. You're a good sport, Morrigan."

"How are you _feeling_ , Dorian?” said Solas from across the fire. “You look better.”

“I am. Thank you for asking.”

“Maybe we should try and get some sleep,” said Sene.

“Yes, perhaps you are right,” said Solas.

But the sky was too dark, and the sanctum too strange. None of them moved from the fire. How could they? Instead, they sat around, showing things to one another until dawn came. And when it did, Sene, armored and ready, her hands wrapped in the worn leather gloves and the bow light on her back, watched Solas, so elegant, so strong and composed, as he stood beside the quiet pool, eyes closed, lifted his hands into the air, and broke his spell over the sanctum.

When he opened his eyes and smiled in her direction, she could not help but wonder. So close and yet so far away. Nothing about him was typical. It was all so strange, so deep, she thought. The more that happened between them, the less she understood and yet, she always wanted more. He knew this. As everything, he understood. But who was he? She smiled back, because he loved her. He truly did. But other than the words and the sex, the feelings he felt when he was with her and her alone, what were the parts she did not see?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Elven Translations:
> 
> “Ju’lanastan sul’na.” - "I will show you mercy."
> 
> “Dirthas, vhenan.” - "Speak, vhenan."
> 
> “Ara vhen’an." - "You are my home."/"You are mine."
> 
> “Isalan lana ara’lan or'sil’dun’sal, su’na.” - "I want to give myself to you, mind, body, and spirit."
> 
> “Gaelathe. Sathan lanas em.” - "Completely. Please, let me."
> 
> "Re gen’adahl esayas i’em, vhenan? Arulin’sil?” - "Is it roots you seek with me, vhenan? In earnest?"
> 
> "Isalan ama dir'vhen'an i'na, Solas." - "I want to build a promise with you, Solas." (A sort of end-all statement, the pinnacle of expression when it comes to love, especially in the throes of an embrace like this, ie: "I want a life with you." More specifically, she's probably thinking about the "promise" she's been trying to get out of him for a while now, which is fuzzy, but hinges on the idea of a more concrete commitment from him.)
> 
> (for full breakdowns of these translations, plus contextual explanation, visit my work [The Dead Season: Full Elvhen Translations](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7477965/chapters/18262279))


	18. The Blacksmith of Ansburg

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One last bit of comfort inside the Temple of Mythal.

Sene had to shake her head hard to get rid of all the bluster. It always took her a moment to gather herself after a fight. More violence with Samson, inside the Temple now, but they'd pushed him and his brigade of sad red soldiers to the bottom of a great hole in the earth. Now, they waited. She stood beside Morrigan, where they'd been discussing the rituals ahead, but at some point, Morrigan, who still somehow smelled of plum and spice, placed her hand on Sene's shoulder, concerned. “Your lover, Inquisitor,” she said, tilting her staff in the direction of Solas, across the pool. “He appears to be hurt.”

"What?" Sene looked, saw him there. He'd lowered to a crouch in the grass, almost out of sight, unraveling the bloodied leather grips from his right hand. He'd not said anything to her. He looked okay, but he was shaken. The hand looked bad, even from here.

“Thank you, Morrigan,” said Sene. Morrigan nodded, affectionate and knowing, almost motherly, in her way.

Meanwhile, Bull and Dorian tended to one another carefully at the great, meaty roots of a nearby tree. Though Dorian’s shoulder injury from back in the Arbor Wilds had mostly healed, he was still not in full form. Bull, softly as he could, was applying more of the poultice he’d used the night before. Dorian leaned against him, tired, wincing. Once she approached Solas, Sene steeled herself and crouched by his side, placed her hand firmly on his wide back, pressing to the dip between his shoulder blades in the way she knew would soothe him. “Are you okay?” she said.

He held out his hand to show her, clenched and unclenched the fist. She could see the meat peaking out from inside the skin, torn raw at the knuckles. He was flinching, in pain. It seemed to surprise him. The injury had first happened the day before, back in the forest, when he’d gotten too close to one of the Red Templars. She’d seen it go down—how he’d had to throw a punch, knuckles straight across the creature’s brutal, rock jaw, then he took the Templar out at the knees as it went down and finished it with magic. It always impressed her, any time she saw him scrap like that. You don't really think of mages with grit in their knuckles, but it happened. She held his hand in both of hers, studied it, the missing skin, undone. She looked up at him.

“Bull has a poultice,” she said. “It should help.”

“Your hair,” he said, smiling, reaching out with his other hand, taking a single red piece of it between his fingers. She felt around the back of her head—sweaty and full of tangles, the braids had all fallen. “Let me fix it,” he said.

“Your hand first,” she said.

“It will be okay, vhenan.”

“I know,” she said. "Still."

She asked him to sit and try not to touch it while she went to get the poultice. He did, dreamily.

Back on the other side of the pool now, Morrigan and Dorian were huddled together in the grass, each holding the others staff, studying.

“Fascinating,” said Dorian. “It’s so crude and yet…so light.”

“I’ve never seen a crystal so singularly blue before,” said Morrigan, her eyes great yellow planets. “How did the arcanist Dagna achieve such...blueness?”

"I think the crystal was always that blue, Morrigan. Dagna just found it and sort of...attached it to the end there."

She gave him a look. "Is that your _expert_ opinion, Lord Pavus? She just _found it_ and _sort of_ _attached it_?"

"Yes it is, in fact," said Dorian. "And I have many, many more where that came from. Expert opinions, that is. Perhaps you'd like to hear them, Morrigan? Or, are you busy at the moment?"

"I'd refuse," said Morrigan, "but at this point, I have a feeling I've very little choice in the matter. I'll steel myself."

"Splendid!"

Bull sat nearby, half-listening it seemed, scraping a whetstone down the length of his sword. He grunted as Sene approached. She could tell he was reluctant to fully let his guard down. They did not know what still lie ahead, beyond the rituals. He was, after all, their rock.

“I don’t have a lot left,” he said of the poultice when she asked. “I can make more, but it might take more time than we've got. Is he okay?”

“This will be fine,” said Sene, taking whatever he had, all of it gunked to the end of a long, linen cloth. “He's fine."

“It doesn’t feel so good at first,” said Bull. “Kind of feels like getting your skin burned off with a branding iron. But it works, fast. Just look at Dorian.”

“Thank you, Bull.”

“Any time, boss," he said.

On her way back to Solas, she passed Morrigan and Dorian once more.

"And _that,_ my dear witch," said Dorian, brandishing Morrigan's staff in the air, "was the _worst_ cheese I ever had from Antiva. Bleh. Could have vomited right there in a wheelbarrow. If only I’d _had_ a wheelbarrow."

Sene laughed when she heard this. Morrigan, as usual, sighed with magnificence.

Solas waited. He looked sort of like a boy there as she approached, pulling up fistfuls of grass with his good hand and tossing them aside. It made her smile. He sat with his legs splayed and straightened, and she plopped down into the grass between them, set her bow off to the side with his staff.

“Dorian seems better,” said Solas. “What are the two of them talking about over there?”

“Oh, you know,” she said.

“I do?”

“Can I see?”

He gave her his hand, both heavy and light, the familiar shape of it. She knew his hands. Had held them, been held by them. They were worn hard from the work of magic and traveling alone, and they seemed filled with great significance and respect for everything they touched or built. Still, for as careful as he was with her and those around him, he did not always think to tend to himself. “This will hurt at first,” she said. “But Bull says it's fast. Are you ready?”

“Yes, vhenan. I am ready.”

She began to apply the poultice, gently with the piece of worn linen. She started where the knuckles where rawest, worked backward from there to make sure that she didn't run out. He closed his eyes immediately, grimaced, exhaled low and deep, gravel in his breath.

"Lean on me," she said.

He braced himself against her, his hand on the back of her neck. This steadied him a little, calmed his breathing, as he leaned forward to touch his damp forehead to hers. It was warm in the Temple. Muggy. 

“How bad is it?” she said.

“Not too bad,” he said, lying, his eyelashes fluttering against her skin. "Like a warm bath."

“I’ll try and be quick.”

His smell was good and strong, surrounding her, reminding her of unwashed bed sheets and Skyhold. She could smell the poultice, too. Heady and medicinal. It was a devouring, thick green substance that stuck to the raw parts of his knuckles easily, but the spaces were small, and delicate. In some ways, she had to go slow.

“Tell me a story, Sene,” he said.

“What kind of story?” she said.

“Anything. Distract me from the pain. Something from before I met you. From before the Breach, before the Inquisition. Something I do not know.”

He leaned back a little now. He watched her work, seeming fascinated for a time, but then he closed his eyes.

“When I was younger,” she said, “I used to run away, all the time.”

This made him smile. “I know this. To Ansburg.”

“Yes, but you don’t know this particular story.”

“How many Ansburg stories do you have, vhenan?”

“A lot,” she said, laughing. She was making progress already. The bleeding had mostly stopped. Most of the cuts and the raw bits were cleaned out and caked shut with green. “But you remember the blacksmith? I talk about him a lot.”

“Yes,” said Solas. “Your friend who’d tell you stories of his late wife. He let you fletch the arrows and sort of looked like Warden Blackwall.”

“Right,” she said. “One day, when I was fourteen, I was sent to observe a transaction—between our merchant and one of the merchants in town.”

“You were a huntress,” said Solas. “Why would your Keeper send you on that kind of errand?”

“As punishment,” she said.

He laughed. “For what, vhenan?”

“Mouthing off to one of the ha’hrens,” she said. “She’d tried instructing me on how to hold my bow.”

“Ah,” said Solas. “I know you well enough to know what comes next. _Ara avise’ain._ ”

“Shh,” she said. “I’m almost finished here.”

“Go on.” He seemed in less pain now, eyes still closed. He’d taken his hand off the back of her neck and let it rest simply in his lap.

“Well, obviously I ditched the merchant, and I skipped the transaction,” she said. “I went to see the blacksmith of Ansburg, but his door was locked. His store was closed. It was unusual. I had to climb up the trellis at the back of the house, and when I looked through his open window, I saw him. He was lying in bed, sick, coughing into a gray handkerchief. When he saw me, I was worried he would be mad. But he was not. He invited me inside where I made him tea and listened to him talk about his wife as always and how she had used to make the most wonderful rabbit soup when he was sick, and how she had this pink umbrella that she would carry with her everywhere, even when it wasn’t raining. He was a sad man, but thoughtful.”

“So, did you make him his rabbit soup?” said Solas.

“Pft, no,” she said. She took the piece of linen cloth now, and she stretched it out as far as it would go and began to bandage it around his hand, slowly, gently. “I can hunt rabbits. I can cook a rabbit on a spit. But I don’t really… _cook_.”

“You bake,” he said. “I’ve eaten your cookies on countless occasions.”

"That’s with Sera only.” She smiled. “And she does most of the work.”

“So what happened?” he said. “With the blacksmith.”

“Oh, nothing really,” she said. She continued the slow, careful wrapping. “This is a boring story. I just kept him company. I stayed with him all day and all night. Sort of like you with me, that very first night, after the Breach. I made a pretty crude dinner from whatever I could scrounge—the man didn't keep much in the way of food—and once he fell asleep, I went back downstairs to the store by myself. I lit the hearth. He had all these old story books, and I read one till I feel asleep on the mat by the fire, and the next morning, he was much better."

"I"m sure he was," said Solas.

"I helped him clean up and open the store," she went on, tucking the loose end of the bandage into one of the folds at the base of his palm, making sure it was secure, "and then I went back into the forest. I hunted a huge ram—like _huge—_ drug it home all by myself. When I got there, I skinned it and cleaned it and presented it as a peace offering to the ha’hren who’d sent me to Ansburg in the first place. Because if she hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to help him—the blacksmith. She was still mad at me, but I think she gave up. You can't have everything.”

She'd finished now. She gave him back his hand and smiled. He studied it—the clean, careful work. “Well-done,” he said. He looked at her, his eyes soft, brimming and honest. “ _Enaste, Isene_." He touched her cheek, smiled. "For the story, and for this.”

“ _Ara enaste_ , _Solas_. Always.”

“May I fix your hair now?”

“Yes,” she said. “You may.”

He picked up his knees to move closer, and she turned around between them. She knew they did not have much time, but she saw Morrigan laughing at something Bull had just said, and it seemed that, somehow, time had stopped. She wondered if Dorian had put some sort of spell on the Templars—to mess with their perception as they wandered out ahead, down in that terrifying hole in the ground. He’d been known to do things like that before, usually in secret, but she couldn’t be sure. Or perhaps it had just been her instincts, infusing them all with a great sense of hope. They knew they were going to win. Samson was weakened, finished. He had nothing left but the armors that, because of Dagna, she knew how to destroy.

She felt Solas’s hands in her hair now, plucking the pins, unraveling the braids so that he could do them all over again. His touch, always so tender. So attuned. How he knew her hair. Its every red curl, unfolding, every tangle and knot.

“Make sure it’s tight,” she said. “Don’t be afraid.”

“I’ll do my best,” he said, smiling. “I know my braids can be clumsy. I am not as good as you or Sera.”

“You’re pretty good,” she said.

“Thank you, vhenan.”

He started how he knew best, by separating her hair into five unruly sections. The two around her face, he pinned up to keep out of the way. It was damp and tangly as chaparral, and he had no comb or brush. He worked carefully, making do. Though the bandaged hand did slow him down a little, it was really just the knuckles, and the bandage was firm, and the poultice finally beginning to soothe him. He tried his best not to pull, but when he inevitably did, he would apologize, and she would reassure him. The section down the middle, he left for now, quiet. The other two, he braided in many tiny pieces—more than just three—shaping them against her head, back and toward the middle, tightly, and he pinned them there, and then he braided the center section from the bottom up. This was the hardest part, as it was something Sera had shown him back in the Emprise du Lion, and he had only done it once since then. He concentrated, worked as quickly as could, and in silence. The loose ends he merged in with the sections in front now, forming almost a crown atop her head, and he secured everything with the small metal pins she always used, making sure it was, again, as she requested, _tight_.

This—this single act had served to undo him time and time again. Braiding Sene’s hair, sweeping it off her neck, keeping it out of her face so that she could do her duty free from its unruly tendencies. He loved her hair with a kind of fierce desperation—the mad red nest of it, the curls. He’d never known anything like it, ever. Not in the Fade, not before. Now, it was the first thing he saw whenever he closed his eyes. That he had grown so accustomed to this, this routine of theirs, braiding her hair in preparation for battle, would have been worrisome if he had been present enough in his own mind to acknowledge it, what little power he had left. But he was not present. He was stashed away somewhere deeply private, a place of mystery and brand new, of her. He loved her so much, it was like being turned inside out, his heart falling to warm, wet, thumping pieces in the grass. A reckless offering. Braiding her hair in the Temple of Mythal, he was sundered, bloody, happy.

Like Sene, Solas had always been rebellious. Especially in his deep youth, he rarely did what was expected of him—and now, it seemed, even those things he had come to expect from himself had become meaningless, repetitive, his intentions no longer clear, and so his instincts ruled him. Pull up the old roots, plant new roots, be _this_. Here, now. Belong to her. And of everything he knew, everything he’d done, all the choices he’d made in his sad, strange, seemingly infinite, unfeeling existence, his love for Sene had somehow become his greatest, most precious rebellion. And it would inevitably consume him raw, and somehow, he knew this, but with his hands in her hair, the Temple humming all around them, _expectant_ in its twisted, ancient miseries _,_ he could do nothing but give himself to her, completely.

When he finished, she felt along the back of her head, studying the braids with her hands. “You did it,” she said, and she turned around to face him, smiling, full of warmth and welcome. She placed both of her hands on his cheeks now—warm, hard, dry hands—but she did not kiss him. She looked on instead, a worried face, a new restraint, wrought from the endless barrage of violence and unraveling the two of them had endured ever since arriving in the Arbor Wilds two days before. He touched the fingers of his bandaged hand to the back of her ear, and she traced her fingers down both lines of his jaw, touching his chin, her twin thumbs pressed to his lips. He kissed them, soft. It was as unthinking as anything else between them, their mutual gratitude, unspoken. She got up first, held out her hand. He followed, picking up his staff, then picking up her bow from where it lie, entangled in the grass and orange flowers. He handed it to her. Together, they rejoined the others.

“We’re ready,” she said.

“You okay, Solas?” said Bull.

“Yes, I am now,” he said. “Thank you, Bull.”

"What a rough couple of days it's been," said Dorian. "And yet, we're all still very, very good looking. Astounding, is it not?"

“Indeed,” said Morrigan, humoring him one last time, holding out her staff, a bright, guiding hand in the way of the rituals. "Now. Shall we proceed, Inquisitor?”

Sene, certain, ready, nodded. Dorian did as well, as did Bull, then Solas. Prepared, all of them, battered and bloodied, about as good as it got. Meanwhile, ahead, more trials, pulsating on the edge of existence. Always with the trials. Some of them violent, some of them…not so much. But Sene was not alone, and her hair was braided tightly to her head, exactly how she liked it, and for now, that was something.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Elven Translations:
> 
> "Ara avise'ain." - "My little flame." (Solas's pet name for Sene)
> 
> "Enaste, Isene." - "Thank you, Isene." ("Enaste" translates literally to "grace" or "blessing." Solas and Sene often use Enaste when thanking one another.)
> 
> "Ara enaste, Solas." - "You're welcome, Solas." (Literal: "My blessing, Solas." or "The blessing is mine.")


	19. When we were young, and life was strange.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Upon returning to Skyhold (finally), Sera pranks Solas in the garden. Cole has a new pet. Sene and Solas spend time together on the battlements. Morrigan offers Sene some ominous clues in the way of love.

“Sera,” said Solas with his mouth full in the garden.

They were sitting together, a plate of round, white cookies on the table between them. Sera had taken to sketching out the shape of his head with a piece of charcoal on parchment. Inordinately large, very round. She'd caught the ears just right.

“Mmhm?”

“What did you put in these cookies?” he said. “They taste...off.”

She laughed, mouth closed, evil.

He squinted at her. “Sera.”

“You didn’t think I’d forget, did you, _elven man_?”

"Excuse me?”

“Oh, come on,” she said, looking up from her sketch. “Don’t you remember Crestwood? Your big dragon speech about protecting the Inquisitor? Blah blah blah. You said I could punish you when we got back to Skyhold. Gave me permission. You asked for lizards, right? So, have them.”

Solas looked down at the cookie in his hand, squishing the grit around between his teeth. “Are these lizard cookies?”

She laughed again. Charcoal on paper. Big head.

“Sera," said Solas, growing impatient, but also strangely curious. “Am I eating lizards?”

“No, you git,” she said. “Like I’d kill a bunch of lizards just to put them in _your_ cookies.”

“Then what’s in them?” he said. “I have eaten thousands of these cookies, Sera. Every day we spend at Skyhold it seems, you and Sene inundate me with another strange concoction. I’ve become a veritable expert of sorts. But they always taste good. These do _not._ What’s in them.”

“Oh _Solas,_ so used to knowing _everything._ Well, ha-ha. I’m not telling. You don’t get to just _know_ this time. It’s a prank. You get to figure it out for yourself.”

“Very well,” he said, and he spit everything out into a napkin, which he folded into a neat square and set on the table between them. “You got me. Where is Sene?”

“How should I know? And anyway, Quiz isn’t going to tell you what’s in those cookies either.”

He smirked at this. “Sene knows what’s in the cookies?”

“Well, yeah. She helped bake them”

“Oh, Sera,” he said, clicking his tongue in disapproval. “That was ill-advised. You should know by now that Sene is a terrible liar.”

“She is not,” said Sera, defensive. “You saw her at the Winter Palace.”

“I did see her at the Winter Palace. But _that_ was not lying. That was scheming. Sene is very smart. Very cool under pressure. She has her charm, and she always wins when the stakes are high. But when the stakes are low, and she’s on the spot, she grows easily self-conscious. She’ll tell the truth just to get it off her chest.”

“Quit thinking about her _chest_ , Solas. And anyway, you’re wrong.”

“We shall see about that,” he said, pushing his chair back from the table, standing and adjusting the new, clean bandage on his hand. 

Sera noticed this. “Hey,” she said, suddenly serious.

“Hmm?”

“How is that?” she said. “Your hand.”

He took a moment to study it, front and back. To remember. How it had looked, how it had hurt, how Sene had made it better.

“Quiz told me how you socked that Templar,” Sera went on. “Pretty friggin badass. Never thought of you as much of a scrapper, Solas.”

“I do what I must,” he said. “My hand is fine now. Sene tended to it well in the Temple. It is nearly healed.”

“Well, good,” she said.

“Thank you, Sera,” he said, smiling. “It means a great deal that you would care enough to ask.”

“Of course I care,” she said, scratching at the back of her head, blushing. “Why wouldn’t I? Just because I put lizards in your cookies…Sol- _arse_ …I still _care._ ”

“I know.” He smiled, walked past her then, hands in his pockets, ready to leave the garden. But then—“Wait,” he said, turning back. “So it _is_ lizards?”

“Not. Lizards.”

She picked up one of the mystery cookies, threw it square into his chest. He managed to catch it, somehow, laughing, tossed it once into the air, then he put it in his pocket. “Pretty good aim, lethal’lan. Next time, throw harder.”

“Is that a friggin dare?”

“Oh, Sera,” he said. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

 

Solas found Sene hanging out with Cole up on the battlements. It was a chilly day. He’d had to go searching. Like two buoys anchored to each other and nothing else, Cole and Sene together were an impractical pairing. They could easily get lost in the endless, dreamy landscape of Skyhold. When he found them, Cole had befriended a nug, and they were sitting on the ground, taking turns petting its ripe, warm tummy. It made these sweet little grunting noises and was very pink.

“Solas,” said Cole right away. He was without his hat. “Come sit with us.”

Solas did not hesitate. He dropped to the hard ground and sat with his legs crossed in front of him. Sene put her head on his shoulder right away, as he gathered his hands to her knee.

“I'm surprised you found us up here,” she said. She had her hair down and brushed, but it still fanned out over her head with the breeze. She'd been wearing it down more often now, seemed less concerned about its unruly nature. He liked this very much.

“It took some sleuthing,” he said. “I was able to track you as far as the library, but from there it was just luck. Dorian wasn’t much help.”

“Red wine in a tall glass. We invited Dorian, but he had other things on his mind,” said Cole, scrubbing the nug behind its ears.

“I’m sure,” said Solas.

He could sense it then, Cole feeling through his mind, reading.

“It's okay, Solas," said Cole.

"What is okay, Cole?"

"You want to kiss her," said Cole, "and you're wondering if it's okay. But she always wants you to kiss her, Solas. She's thinking of it, too. Right now. Both of you, the same. Like one paper heart, folded in half. It makes you both so happy."

Sene laughed at this. She seemed so alert, so alive that day. Her freckles punching him into existence, her hair a fiery nest for him to feel. Ever since her time asleep in the Fade, spending time with Cole always revived her somehow, made her more real. It seemed to remind her that she was young, and that life was strange. "It's true," she said.

Solas smiled and put his face into her hair, kissed her scalp.

"Very good!" said Cole.

“Now," said Solas, gesturing to the nug. "Who is this?"

“This is Pepper,” said Cole. “Say hello, Pepper.”

Pepper grunted, nuzzled to Solas’s knee. Solas nudged the small, round thing beneath its chin, loving.

“You like nugs?” said Sene.

“How could I not?”

“Nugs are wonderful,” said Cole. “Pepper brings happiness to the girls in the kitchens. They get very tired peeling all those potatoes, but they squeal any time he appears. It reminds them that their work is important.”

“Pepper came from Leliana,” said Sene.

“Ah,” said Solas.

“Inquisitor," said Cole. "Or, Sene. You prefer Sene."

"Whatever you want, Cole."

"All right. Sene. I like Sene. It's small, like a radish."

"A radish?" said Solas, grinning.

"Sene," said Cole.

"Hmm?"

"Solas is wondering if there are lizards in the cookies." He looked at Solas then, confused, his eyes these great big comforting, watery planets. "Lizards?" he said.

“Lizards?” said Sene.

“Yes," Cole went on, "but...I think that was one of those things I was not supposed to say out loud. Like how he would also like me to leave, so that he can take your hair and—”

“Thank you, Cole," said Solas.

“So that you can take my hair and _what,_ Solas?” said Sene.

Solas cleared his throat, gave her a look.

Cole blushed then, picked up the nug beneath its little arms, kissed it on the face. “We’ll be going now,” he said. “Thank you, Sene. For sitting with me. I enjoyed looking at your mind today.”

“Did you see anything good?” she said.

“Oh, yes. Green butterflies and antlers,” he said, smiling, getting to his feet. “Pale birds on a bright, pink cloud. The soft wolf waits, and there is a song in your head. It is tired, but still the same song as before. I’m glad you did not drink from the Well of Sorrows.”

“Me, too,” she said. “Goodbye, Cole.”

“Goodbye, Sene, and goodbye, Solas.”

“Goodbye, Cole,” said Solas. “Goodbye, Pepper.”

“Pepper can’t talk, but he is usually thinking of carrots.”

“I shall bear that in mind,” said Solas, “for next time.”

He turned around, his tall puppy's body, kissing the nug on its nose and whispering in its tiny, pink ear, disappearing down the stairs to the world below.

Once he was gone, Solas wasted no time. He wrapped his arms all the way around Sene and whispered into her ear, “Tell me what’s in the cookies, _avise’ain_.”

He could feel her cheeks warming against his skin. She smiled, too, with teeth, eyes closed. “Is that really what you came here for?”

“Perhaps.”

“What about the thing with my hair?"

"We'll get to that."

"I am _not_ supposed to tell you," she said.

He reached into his pocket then, handed her the cookie Sera had thrown at him in the garden. “All right," he said. "Fair enough.”

“Okay,” she said, kissing the hard angle of his jaw. “It’s not lizards. It’s anchovies.”

“ _Anchovies?_ ” said Solas, genuinely surprised. “You put tiny, sour fish in my cookies?”

She laughed into her hands. “ _Dried_ _up_ and _ground_ tiny sour fish. Don’t tell Sera I told you.”

“I told her you would not lie,” he said, taking back the cookie and tossing it over the edge of the battlement. “She did not believe me.”

“Well, Sera is a good friend,” she said.

“Her love for you is impressive. Cherish it, vhenan.”

The wind picked up. She climbed between his legs to get warm, her back pressed into his chest. He put his arms around her and his chin on her shoulder. Their hands touching and playing into one another where they rested in her lap. They watched the pale afternoon sun dip behind the Frostbacks. Solas felt dazed by just the smell of her. To be at Skyhold. How he had missed it—the clean air, the safety and sublime, the weight of its presence around him, the magic in the walls. It had been ages, it seemed, since they’d been back here, _really_ back. With time to spare.

Ever since that night they'd spent in the sanctum, and then, the next morning, when she took him into her arms, healed his hand, told that story of the blacksmith, he'd found himself floating. Far away, high above, entering a new equilibrium he did not know existed. And Solas knew a great many things. She made it so easy to _be._ So he did not think of the Temple, not of the Well, or Abelas, not that day. He thought of nothing but Sene. Right now. He wanted her. But he knew, as well that he did not want her up here, not on the battlements, not exposed to the cold, afternoon sky, not where they could be found. He wanted her in bed, warm, protected, beneath the long, gold sheets that would be washed and ready for them, brand new and waiting. Night. Still, he spoke to her, in the way he knew she liked, sprinkled the words like grit in her hair so that they spilled all down the back of her neck, making her shiver. He could not help himself. “Vhenan,” he said, so deep so she could barely make out the sound. “I have missed this. You, here. At Skyhold.”

“Me, too,” she said. “But, _l_ _anas itha da’lav, Solas._ ” She turned around to look at him with wide, serious eyes.

This was expected. She worried for him. He held out his bandaged hand to show her. He began to remove the bandage, slowly. Together, they watched the pale knuckles emerge from beneath the linen—scarred, but all better. He let the bandage fall and watched, felt as she took the hand into her own, exploring the new skin. He dragged his other hand all the way up her arm as she did this, squeezed her shoulder, then he put it into her hair. He pushed it off of her neck, placed his mouth right there, on the nape, warm and shallow.

“Let me braid your hair,” he said. “So that I can take it down again.”

She found this amusing as she studied his hand, molded each finger inside her own. “Ah,” she said. "There it is."

"Can I?"

"No."

He smiled. This had also been expected. So he removed his hand from her grasp and put it on her knee, feeling up the warm length of her thigh. “Why not, vhenan?” he said.

She smiled more still. He kissed her neck, again, both sides, the long backs of her ears. His hand moved to her inner thigh now, awaiting her response. She parted her legs, only just.

“Because that is serious foreplay,” she said. "What that turns into, we don't have time for."

“I can be fast.”

“You can never be fast, Solas. Not when there is my hair."

“Please?” he said.

She shook her head slowly, feeling his lips dragging across the skin at the back of her neck. “I have a meeting soon. Morrigan. I can’t miss it.”

“Then what will you have me do?” he said. “Right now. Instead.”

“This," she said. 

"This?" he said.

She nodded. “Yes.”

" _San,_ " he said. "Vhenan."

She backed into him then, gently, even closer than before so that he surrounded her, her legs falling open, so that her knees pressed into his. She closed her eyes then as he warmed his hand between her legs. He could feel her muscles tensing, releasing as he eased against her. Then, he undid her, one velvet button at a time, about five total from the waist down.

“Should you cast your spell?” she said.

“What spell, vhenan?”

“The one you cast in the Temple.”

“Oh, that? No.”

“Do you think you should try?”

This made him smile, as he slid his hand past the open buttons. One finger, then two, drawing the wet, drawing a gasp. And it was soft but a definite shift. Delicate. He was quiet and in no hurry. “That is not an easy spell,” he said. “It needs my full attention. I would have to stop."

“No,” she said. “ _No ha'lam_. But what if someone comes?”

“No one will come, Isene,” he said. Then, he corrected himself. “Well…”

“Shh,” she said. "You're right."

“Tell me,” he said then, his touch deeper now, as he gestured with his other hand to a door up past the great, stone staircase leading down. She turned her head lazily to look. “What’s behind that door, vhenan? I don’t believe I’ve been in there before.”

“It’s just an old room,” she said, reaching back to clasp onto his neck with both hands. His face had pressed to the side of her own, and as he built intensity, her breath quickened. Her chest rising, falling. Haste. “There are tons of them at Skyhold. No one lives there. It has no roof. Maybe ghosts.”

“Ghosts?"

“Cole thought—”

“Shh. Let us not mention what Cole thought.”

“I—”

“Could we go in there?” he said.

“What would we do?"

“Would you like me to tell you?”

“Yes,” she said, smiling. “ _Sathan, Solas. Dirthas em._ ”

“Very well,” he said, working his other hand up her shirt now, slowly. “ _Ju’veran nar julathe._ ”

She nodded, eyes closed. “I know that part. Then what?”

He kissed her behind the ear, so soft. He was inside her now. She squirmed against him, put her hand on top of his, nudging him deeper. “ _Ju’palan na la’var eir i vunlea diala alastarasyl’en,_ ” he said, allowing, deepening, “ _i melahn evun’en gava, ju’palan na tath. Bell’ana inor’avise’ain._ ” He whispered, “Morrigan will be waiting for some time. What do you think, vhenan?"

She was getting close now. He could feel it, his other hand so far up her shirt, he’d latched a full arm across her chest. Holding her tight. Bracing her against him. Sene was strong, remember, and whenever she crashed for him, she went hard.

“You talk so good,” she said, she breathed into his neck. “How do you do that?”

This made him laugh, low. “You haven’t answered my question, vhenan.”

“I think—” But it was too late. She was there, arriving to the edge and spilling over all at once, arching her hips, twisting in his embrace, making her long, familiar moans with her fingers now digging into the back of his neck where she held him. As she went, he lost his own breath, too, working hard to keep her steady, deeply excited. Bringing her to this point, it was always a revelation. Every time.

She never went fully limp, the hair in her face. He pushed it aside for her, kissed the back of her neck. She was still buzzing, humming at the edge. He could feel it, barely hanging on, and so he curled his fingers into her one more time, gently, deep to the place she liked it best, then shallow, then deep again, and he raked her past one climax and into another, and this one stronger and longer than the last, like a deep, slow burn to the bottom of the wick, and when _finally_ she was finished, her legs shaking, her strength consumed, he withdrew, used both hands to button her up, and his face was in her hair, his own breath tattered but calming fast. She sat forward then to gather herself, let her head hang between her knees. Meanwhile, he sat back, leaning on his palms.

After he didn’t say or do anything for a while, she glanced at him over her shoulder. The look on her face—she knew him well. Once, this might have worried him, but now.

“You look pleased with yourself,” she said, flushed, her eyes their clever green in the late afternoon sun.

He smirked. "I am quite pleased, yes."

“Solas,” she said. “You’re not going to fuck me in that haunted, roofless room, are you? Not by the light of the mountains? Not still when the _moons bite_?”

This made him laugh, wholehearted. “No, vhenan,” he said. “That was just...for you. Some choice words in the moment. But I won’t keep you from your duty, not today."

Half-glaring, she said, "I knew that."

"Come on," he said. "You know as well as I, to have each other up here, it would be rushed and crude. We’ve been away for a long time. Campfires, the forest floor, and sticky tents. Out of doors. I’m done with that for a while. Now that we’re home, I want all of you, for a long, long time. No rush. No limits. I want a roof over our heads. I came up here to find you, and then when Cole left, I wanted to pleasure you, and so I did. Twice. But tonight, in your bed, Isene, we can…well. You know. And you can return the favor, if you wish.”

She tossed the hair off her shoulders and shoved him once in the chest, playful. “I _agree_ ,” she said. “And I _will_ return the favor. Twice. If you’re lucky.” He smiled at this, and he leaned forward and tugged a little behind her ears with both hands, and she fell into him quickly then, her forehead on his chin, a rush, a sigh, like a seam in her heart come free. “I love you,” she said.

How quickly it could become this. How she could go from sex to talk to breathless, all-defining love in an instant. She was so fast, so eager, and unafraid. This is what she'd taught him. The body, the mind, the heart, all of them can be one. Attuned to one another. Beating in time as if there were nothing to lose.

He grew serious then, almost solemn. He brought his thumb to her freckled cheekbone. “ _Ara vhen’an. No enas eolasa._ ”

“Yes, I can, Solas. _Eolasan._ "

He smiled, kissing her, soft and shallow, and then she let her head fall to his chest and took a deep, deep breath.

They stayed like that, just for a moment, and when the moment passed, they helped each other up, calmly. He put a pin in her hair, just to tame it in the front a little bit. He’d taken to carrying a handful in his pocket, just in case. She smoothed her blouse, a shy, rich green, and shivered. The sun had gotten lower as they left the battlements. The day was gone to blue. Solas walked Sene to the garden where she was to meet with Morrigan. Sera was no longer there, but she'd left her sketch—stuck to the surface of the table with an arrow. It was signed: _For the elven man. With love._

“This is you?” said Sene, studying the sketch. "That's so sweet. She got the ears just right. Look."

“She always gets the ears,” said Solas. “I've no idea how she does it. But she always gets the ears."

 

Much later, Sene was sitting with Morrigan on a bench inside the gazebo as the sun went down. Since drinking from the Well of Sorrows, Morrigan had a great deal to report. At first, Sene had been very excited. She was booksmart and curious, and what Abelas had said, despite Solas's seeming lack of interest—it had stuck with her. Though she’d never been set on the stories she’d learned being Dalish, they were still…her stories. They were a part of her, tattooed on her face. And the way it had all affected Dorian as well—this made her eager, hungry as she sat there, listening to Morrigan unveil the truths she'd gathered from the Well. Sene wanted to know more. Unfortunately, however, most of what Morrigan had for her on the subject of elves was vague, predicated on  _feelings_ and _wisdom_. She had very little concrete knowledge, very little fact at her disposal. More fodder for Sera, Sene thought. It’s all just fuzzy bullshit. And while Sene did not agree with that either, she was conflicted. Abelas had run, had disappeared. Where was he now? Sene was angry with him the longer she sat there. She liked information. She liked things she could touch and feel. Hot things, sticky things, hard things. Stuff that was true. It was all an essential part of her impatience.

At some point, however, they were discussing Corypheus, and Sene began to grow numb. She was tired, sick of all the shrouded insinuation of elven history. And every time it seemed she’d gotten one step closer to freeing herself from all of it—elves, bullshit, the perilous task at hand—it would find her again, snatch up her heart, squeeze it until she could take no more. Plus, her memories from the Arbor Wilds were confusing, banging against one another now like pots and pans inside her head. This did not help. The moments of sweet and relative stillness spent with Solas in the Temple and since then kept paling to all the fucked up, traumatic red violence she couldn’t shake. And now, with Morrigan, she felt plumb exhausted, and though she was thankful for Morrigan’s willingness to share, to discuss, to go on and on and on about the nuances of this or that, she just—wanted Solas. She wanted to be in Skyhold with Solas. It was no longer a passing desire but full blown need. Even just being in the garden, smelling the ancient flowers as they clustered to her ankles, she was still aroused from his touch on the battlements, hazy to the world, thinking of his hands. Her heart and her body spring-loaded. She wanted bed sheets. She wanted fire. She wanted his voice in her ear like gravel, and if they ever got around to discussing the elves and what happened at the Temple, then so be it. But for now, she was content with mystery if it meant him inside her.

“Morrigan,” she said at this point. “How soon do you feel we need to be at the Shrine? Are we in a large hurry?”

“Well,” said Morrigan, deep in thought, “perhaps not. Our success in the Arbor Wilds has driven Corypheus into hiding for the moment. I do believe you’ve bought yourself a small amount of time, Inquisitor, if it is time you desire.”

“Yes,” said Sene. “It is. We need time. The troops are tired. Me included. There were a lot of injuries in the Arbor Wilds, and I feel that rest is necessary to keep morale high in preparation for our final battle. Whenever that turns out to be. Plus, you were there. I just—it was a long couple of days.”

Morrigan studied her. Closely. Her focus, in effect, was not unlike Solas’s. “Yes,” she said. “I agree.”

“Fantastic,” said Sene.

“Inquisitor,” said Morrigan.

“Yes?”

“I—forgive me. But just now. I have sensed something in you. Something I did not sense before.”

“What is it?” said Sene.

“I’m not—‘tis…a maternal essence? Motherhood.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry,” said Morrigan. “That was oddly…intimate. I don’t mean to suggest you are with child. The sensation is vague, but it is most definitely not that. Perhaps it is a story of that which shall come to pass?”

“Motherhood?” said Sene. “I—I don't think I'm ready for that.”

“You do have a rather serious lover, do you not?”

“He’s not ready for that either,” said Sene. “Trust me. I know myself. I know the days I’m…we’re careful. Most of the time.”

“It could be in the somewhat distant future, could it not? You are young. He is young as well."

"It could be," said Sene. "Maybe."

"I have read him as well as you these past few days, Inquisitor," said Morrigan. "Since drinking from the Well, my understanding of your Solas has...changed. At first, I thought him little more than an arrogant hothead with too much interest in the Fade, but now, I am not so sure.”

“What do you mean?”

“I sense rebellion in him,” she said. “A deep immaturity, but he is not a child. He is wise. He sees the path, and he follows the path. I see the way he loves you as well. In fact, it has become impossible to ignore. It fills the walls of this ancient fortress as if it owns the place. His love is…aggressive. It is not typical.”

“ _Aggressive_?” said Sene. “What are you getting at?”

“I’m not sure,” said Morrigan. “I only know that it is strong. Primal energies abound between you. I have not seen or felt this kind of love in some time.”

“Have you ever been in love?” said Sene.

With this, Morrigan froze, stalled. She stared out into the endless cycle of existence with her hard, yellow eyes. Usually, it stared back at her, mean, its great jaws wide and black and making her cautious, but not today. This strange, young red-headed elf with more power at her disposal than she currently understood had come to her in earnest. Her question was pure. “I have been in love,” she said. “Once. But that is in the past.”

“Is that how you know so much?” said Sene. “I have never been in love before Solas. He’s the first man I’ve ever really…known at all. Half the time, I feel like I’m guessing with him. I know he loves me, but I don’t know what comes next.”

Morrigan softened now, smiling down on her, deeply and unexpectedly charmed. “Child,” she said, “you are doing just fine.”

“How do you know?”

“Did you not hear everything I just told you? The man is at your mercy. There is permanence at work here. True permanence is a rare thing indeed. Whatever he is, he is now yours as well.”

“But what does that mean, Morrigan— _whatever he is_?”

“I am not sure,” said Morrigan. “As I said earlier. Nothing about him is typical.”

“You said his _love_ was not typical.”

“Yes, but at the moment, _love_ is what he is. Don't you see? He clings to it, desperately, at the end of a very long rope that spans—well…that is the end of all I can conjure. But I do feel something, Inquisitor. He is a good man. He takes no path unless he intends to see it through to its final destination. ‘Tis an oddly familiar understanding, to be honest. As if I knew him in another life.” She looked down at Sene now. She could sense the impatience in her, the heightened youth. Everything about Sene Lavellan was fast and raw, the edges blistering into these quick, red flowers that made her bright and whimsical. She wanted more than she got, always. And yet, for her, this was a discontent. She did not desire the chase. It was purely an impulse she could scarcely deny. More than anything, however, in that moment, Morrigan could sense a need in her. To be held, touched. She wanted to go _home._ “We are through here,” Morrigan said. “I thank you for humoring me, Inquisitor. You are dear company in the way of knowledge. I will admit I did not expect you to be so curious. ‘Twas my own mistake.”

“Perhaps we can talk more tomorrow?” said Sene.

Morrigan nodded, winked. “I hope I did not worry you,” she said. “I did not mean to discuss Solas at such length. I am aware of what you two mean to each other. I have seen it, in both action and repose. Please know that all I feel, it culminates into what I believe to be _happiness._ ”

“It’s all right,” said Sene. “Actually, it means a lot. Just to talk about it. Sera is good for talking about a lot of things, but Solas…he’s not one of them. But I have felt it, too, what you said. The way he loves me. It _is_ big. Whatever that means. It’s just big.” She grew self-conscious then, crossed her arms over her chest. “Sorry. I’m not the wordsmith he is. Or you for that matter.”

“Your words are sound, Inquisitor,” said Morrigan, placing her hand on Sene’s knee, just for a moment. “Just follow your heart. It is ripe and true. Wherever _it_ guides you, that is the path of knowledge you seek.”

"Can I—can I ask you one more question before I go?" said Sene.

"Of course," said Morrigan.

"When you read him," said Sene, sitting up now, alert, seeming to search the grass, then the palms of her hands for something—for reassurance, for answers. "Solas—when you read him, do you feel anything from before the Breach? Before me?"

The pin in her hair had come loose now, the red curls escaping as flames on the wind. She looked up at Morrigan. She was a fierce, mysterious child of the woods. An elf of faith. She glowed. Her power a hard, cold piece at the center of some unknown natural order. And yet, she was just a woman, it seemed. Sitting here, full of questions, afraid of losing, in love.

So Morrigan closed her eyes. Her mind played back as a mosaic, shattered, in color and time. And yet.

"I see only darkness," said Morrigan. "Sleep. There is sadness, but...'tis not something I am able to comprehend. He may be repressing something, Inquisitor. There is a gate. A veil of sorts, but—" Her eyes flickered open. She focused on Sene. "I wish there was more, child. But 'tis all I can see."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Elven Translations: 
> 
> “Lanas itha da’lav, Solas.”- "Let me see your hand, Solas."
> 
> "San." - "Okay." (short for "eolasan," which means "I understand.")
> 
> “Sathan, Solas. Dirthas em.” - "Please, Solas. Tell me."
> 
> “Ju’vera nar julathe.” - "I will take off your clothes."
> 
> “Ju’palan na la’var eir i vunlea diala alastarasyl’en..." - "I will fuck you for as long as the snow and the sun cover the high mountains..."
> 
> “...i melahn evun’en gava, ju’palan na tath. Bell’ana inor’avise’ain.” - "...and when the moons bite, I will fuck you still. Forever inside you, little flame."
> 
> “Ara vhen’an. No enas eolasa.” - "My heart. You cannot begin to understand."
> 
> "Eolasan." - "I understand."
> 
>  
> 
> (for full breakdowns of these translations, plus contextual explanation, visit my work [The Dead Season: Full Elvhen Translations](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7477965/chapters/18262279))


	20. Repercussions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Both Sene and Solas have a great deal to process after what happened in the Arbor Wilds. The gang plays Wicked Grace. A mysterious development takes shape at Skyhold.

Sene found him painting in the rotunda. She had not seen him paint in a long time—not since the morning they returned from Halamshiral. In fact, other than all the times he’d sketched her on paper, she’d never truly watched him _paint_. Not here. Solas’s art was private, a lonely act that he rarely spoke of. Sene respected this on instinct. She understood. When they’d have to set up camp in some remote, shit region, and food was scarce, she’d go out on her lonesome to shoot down something big, drag it back, skin it, clean it, and cook its pieces on a spit. And she always hunted alone. It was her method. Solas never questioned this. It was an understanding. And when he painted, it was a similar conceit—albeit more beautiful and more mysterious. He was talented, though he kept it a secret, and she sort of liked this about him—that he had this skill that existed entirely outside of her and outside their relationship. It predated her. It made him seem whole, somehow. She knew so little about his history. This was another clue.

So she said nothing at first, just hung back in the doorway. She could be very quiet. He was high up on a raised platform, sitting close to the wall, sketching something out in white paint with a narrow brush. He wore a loose, thin shirt of pale blue cotton, and as she watched him work, she could see the muscles fluttering in his triangular back, the shoulder blades shifting. He tilted his head, made a smudge with his fingers, leaned back on his palms to take in a fuller picture. Skyhold was quiet that night. The room bright with lanterns. All you could hear were the scrapings of Solas’s paintbrush against the wall. She did not want to disturb him, came into the room quietly and sat down on the couch at the center. She folded her legs beneath her and found herself suddenly very nervous. She touched her palms to her stomach, a strange instinct, looked down.

What Morrigan had said about motherhood—it was strange to her. Sene did not tend to overthink things, and hypotheticals were Solas’s territory, not hers. Sene _felt_ things. For Sene, once something was felt, there it was. Like a pine cone in her hand, or a flowerbox, a feather. Her emotions became her, not the other way around. And while she had certainly thought of their bodies as animal bodies, and the _idea_ that she could become pregnant with Solas’s child was like a mind-fuck, crashing through her heart and her body until she wanted him so badly her insides itched and squirmed, she’d never given _motherhood_ any real, rational thought. Why would she? She knew she would never be ready for motherhood until motherhood became her. That’s just how she worked.

Looking up at Solas on the platform, she wondered if he’d ever thought of it, even just in passing. Like she’d said to Morrigan, they tried to be careful, and he was a terribly disciplined lover, but they had made mistakes before. Sene did not often think about the future. She tended to live fast, her whole heart in the day to day. She knew this about herself, and that she wasn’t perfect. It made her impulsive and perhaps too trusting. She relied on Solas and her advisors for any real sense of perspective in the grand scheme of war, because it was easy for her to forget the bigness, the massive scope of their undertaking in the Inquisition. She was full of heart, knowledge, bravery, and a sort of undiluted love for the people, for adventure, and so this is how she lead them. But planning anything on any massive scale was not her specialty, nor was it her interest. Her focus was a moth, traveling hopelessly to wherever the light shone brightest. And the light was always brightest right here, right now.

And right now, there he was. Still painting. He was crouching now, his hand on the wall as he filled in shapes with delicate gold—like a foil. He sort of peeled it to the surface and sculpted it there with a blunt metal tool. And it was at about this time that he noticed her, finally, looking up as if he’d caught her scent, and then he looked over his shoulder. She straightened up on the couch. He smiled, genuine and deeply surprised, turned around on his knees with his hands holding to the edge of the platform. There were smudges of white paint on his shirt and on his pants.

“Sene,” he said. “You snuck up on me.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t want to disturb.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “Come here.”

“Up there?”

“Yes, up here.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course, vhenan.”

He stood up and turned back around to face the unfinished fresco. Sene was surprised. He had never invited her to share in his painting before. This felt important, or at the very least new. It was just like Morrigan had said—how he loved her. They had come such a long way. She climbed the ladder to the top of the platform. Once she was up there, he opened his arm for her to fit inside, left his hand in a soft grip on the back of her neck.

At first, he didn’t say anything. He still seemed focused, sketching something out in his head. She followed his eyes. The shape she saw was that of a hooded man, cloaked in black. It was still rough, but the gold foil seemed to be associated with armor.

“What do you see?” said Solas, finally, looking down at her.

She could feel him watching, though she did not watch him back. She stayed focused on the painting. “Abelas,” she said.

“Good,” he said, smiling. “I was worried. This one’s been giving me some trouble.”

“What are you talking about?” said Sene. “It’s so—look at this.” She held out her hand, but then it occurred to her that maybe she shouldn’t touch. “May I?” she said.

“You may.”

She proceeded, touched the gold foil softly with just the tips of her fingers. It was smoother than she thought it would be. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said.

“It’s a simple technique. I picked it up in Orlais.”

“When?”

“Many years ago, vhenan. I was quite young.”

“I wish I knew more about it."

“There is plenty of time for you to learn,” he said.

“I can’t do this.”

“Well—” he said, seeming to catch himself inside some rather humorous truth. She knew what he was thinking. Sene was many things. But she was no artist. He cleared his throat.

"You were saying?” she said, smiling. “So cocky, Solas.” She clicked her tongue at him.

“I am not,” he said.

“Oh, really?”

“Sene, you are a talented woman,” he said. “I have seen you hunt, skin, and then clean an entire bear to pristine, some might say, _expensive_ conditions, entirely without aid, inside of one hour. At your stature, no less. Do you think I could do that?”

“No,” she said, pleased with herself. “And, thank you.”

“What I was going to say was that, despite your isolated childhood, you’ve managed to educate yourself on matters of culture to an impressive degree. I’m surprised you’ve not encountered a bit more art in your studies.”

“I have encountered a lot of art,” she said, still tracing her hand across the foil. “I’ve just never seen this.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

She raised her eyebrows, mimicking him. “As you should.”

She put both of her hands on the painting then, tracing along its ridges and lines, studying it closely.

“I was just thinking about Abelas,” she said.

“What about him?”

“Everything.”

She felt his touch, moving the hair off the back of her neck. “Like what?" he said. "Tell me.”

“About the elves,” she said, sighing, ambivalent. She was unsure if she wanted to talk about this at all. “At war...with each other. Tevinter. Mythal. Morrigan had a lot to report. Mostly, it was really, really vague, but this—this makes me remember.” She turned to look at him.

He looked concerned, put his hands on her cheeks then and shook his head slightly. “Sene," he said. "Even if what Abelas said was true, how would that change things?”

“This tattoo on my face for one,” she said, looking down, almost embarrassed. “It’s a lot like his. I just—he still looked at us like we were nothing, Solas. _Elvhen_ , he said. I don’t understand.”

“Are you bothered by the vallaslin?” said Solas, rubbing a thumb across each cheekbone, tracing the length of each tattoo, nose to ear.

“Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know. I just—aren’t you?”

“No,” he said, serious. “No.”

“I don’t know if I am,” she said. “I just—”

“Vhenan,” he said, “are you crying?"

She realized it, only then. She _was_ crying. Not weeping or anything, but there were tears. Real tears. She smudged them off her cheeks with the back of her hand, feeling like a little kid. She had not cried in such a long time, not really. In fact, Solas had never seen her cry. He'd seen her frantic. He'd seen her bleeding to death on a frozen battlement in the Emprise du Lion. But he'd never seen her cry. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, embarrassed.

He tugged her into his chest, held her seriously, his cheek pressed firmly to the top of her head. “Do not apologize.”

“I know,” she said, catching her breath, sniffling. She’d mostly stopped as he raked a hand through her hair. “I just surprised myself. I was confused.”

“ _Ara vhenan,_ ” he said. _“Ju'aman nar numin, Isene_ _._ ”

She hugged him so tightly, the fabric of his shirt balled into her fists. “ _Enaste,_ ” she said, comforted. “ _Ara vhen’an._ ”

“I’m finished here,” he said, holding a piece of her hair between his fingers. “We can go upstairs now. We can talk more, about this, if you like.”

“No,” she said, pulling away, looking up at him. “I don’t feel like talking about this anymore. Not now. It’s giving me a headache.”

He smiled, cautious. “All right,” he said.

“Let’s go,” she said, pressing her lips to his shoulder. “Perhaps the moons will be biting tonight?”

He laughed at this, smirked, in his way. “Perhaps,” he said, putting the hair off her shoulders. She liked it when he touched her hair like that.

He went down the ladder first, and she followed. He guided her to the floor and held her hand.

 

When they got to the main hall, it was quiet, but not entirely empty. In fact, sitting at a table all the way at the end toward the Undercroft, they saw Dorian and the Iron Bull, along with Sera, Varric, and Cole. Cole was without his nug, but also without his hat. The group was engrossed in a game of Wicked Grace.

“Well well,” said Varric, looking up from his cards as the two approached, “if it isn’t Chuckles and the Inquisitor, our merry elven pair. Care to join us?”

“This is crap!” said Bull, slamming his cards down on the table.

“A _hem,_ ” said Dorian. “Perhaps you’ve noticed we are in distinguished company, Bull? Or would you continue your tantrum?”

Bull looked up, surprised. “Oh, hey, Solas,” he said. “Hey, boss. You guys in?”

“My great, handsome brute,” said Dorian.

“I don’t think so,” said Sene. “Next time.”

Sera laughed long and weird from the other side of the table.

Sene sighed.

“Say what?” she said. “Say… _sex pout_?”

Solas raised his eyebrows. “Sex pout?”

"I said nothing,” said Sene.

“Sene’s hair is down,” said Cole. “Soon it will be up in her braids. But then…it will be down again. Why?” He peeked up at them from over the top of his cards. “I quite like it down.”

“That’s very sweet, Cole,” said Sene, blushing.

“We’ll be going now,” said Solas. “You all have a great deal of fun without us.”

Sera snorted. “Don’t worry, _elven man_. We won’t crash your no-underwear party. Or something.”

“I appreciate that, Sera,” he said. “Just as I appreciate your cookies. Even when they taste like gross, tiny fish.”

“ _Solas_ ,” said Sene, elbowing him, hard.

“Ah, I’m sorry, vhenan,” he said. “It just…slipped out.”

“It's okay, Quiz,” said Sera. “I knew you'd tell him eventually. I’m not daft. Besides, that wasn’t your real punishment anyway, Solas.”

“It wasn’t?”

“Pft.”

“Well, then I look forward to a better effort next time around.”

“Get off?”

“Where’s Blackwall?” said Sene. “I would have thought he’d be here. He likes cards, doesn’t he?”

“Couldn’t find him,” said Sera. “Maybe he’s off with _Josie_.”

“Josie?” said Sene. “Blackwall and Josie?”

Sera laughed, again.

“Hey, Solas,” said Dorian, reordering his cards in his hand.

“Yes, Dorian?”

“I was wondering if tomorrow, at some point, you might be willing to…show me that spell. The one you performed at the Temple. I can’t stop thinking about it, if we’re being perfectly honest. I’m quite smitten.”

This made Solas smile, warm and tremendous. “Of course, Dorian,” he said. “Come by the rotunda before lunch.”

“Splendid!”

“You might want to…stretch your mind a bit first though,” he said. “It’s not at all easy. If you’re serious, it may take several sessions.”

“No need to be cocky,” said Dorian.

“I didn’t mean—”

“My mind is quite limber, thank you.”

“That's not the only thing on you that's limber, kadan,” said Bull, raising his eyebrows. Then he looked at Varric, stern. He grunted, “I’ll see your two silvers and raise you to three.”

“Bold,” said Varric as Dorian rolled his eyes, “especially considering the fact that you’ve slammed your cards down on the table six times since we got here. And that was only ten minutes ago.”

“Maybe I’m psyching you out,” said Bull. “You ever think of that?”

“You know, I hadn’t. But you don’t strike me as much of a gambler, so…”

“What was that, dwarf?”

“I only said—”

“Make it six silvers. And if I win, drinks are on you tonight.”

“And if _I_ win?” said Varric.

“Then they’re on me. Don’t overcomplicate things. This isn’t one of your stories.”

Varric sighed. “Very well, Tiny. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

 

Once they were upstairs, Solas stoked the fire. He was tall, she thought. So tall. Sometimes, it still surprised her. She went to him, laced her fingers into his and studied his hand, again. There was paint grit worked in his skin, under his fingernails, and the new, pink knuckles, and she was so endeared by this, she sort of openly sighed and pressed his palm to her cheek. She felt his touch, responsive, warm, the careful, focused gestures she knew so well. He traced a finger from her jaw line, all the way down to her chin, tilted it up so he could see her face. His eyes were very big, very open to her, as great stars. She was overcome with the need to be vulnerable to him. She could not gather the feeling any better than that.

“Elven man,” she said.

This made him laugh. “Yes, vhenan. How can I help you?”

“Do what you will,” she said. “Do you want to braid my hair?”

Then, the smirk. Softer than usual, but his all the same. “I do,” he said.

“It’s all yours.”

He wasted no time. He knelt down to find her brush and a handful of pins where she kept them in a chest by the foot of the bed. Then, they sat down on the mat in front of the fire. She sat before him, watching the flames. It was hot and it held her, crackling.

“My hands are still covered in paint,” he said.

“That’s okay,” she said.

He started slow, pulling the brush through, gently. There were tangles, but she did not mind. It was part of the process. Sene was wistful. He had his legs on either side of her, splayed out, and she picked up one of his knees so that she could kiss it. Soon, she could feel him. Braiding her hair. Again. It had become a ritual with them, something both utilitarian and...deeply intimate. No matter what, he worked well, quiet, focused, his technique soft and getting better every time.

“Tell me a story,” she said.

“Vhenan,” he said, but she she could tell he was smiling, just by the sound of his voice. “I’m quite busy.”

“Please?”

He sighed. “I suppose I owe you one,” he said.

This made her smile. “Yes, you do.”

She felt the pluck of his fingers, a bright tug on her scalp. She closed her eyes, knew it was all welling inside him, something magical and complicated. Solas was very, very good at stories.

“When I was a young teenager,” he said, “my mother had a simple rose garden. She watered it every day.”

“Your mother?” said Sene.

“Shh,” he said. “Let me tell the story, vhenan."

"Sorry."

"One afternoon, she sent me into the city for a new pair of scissors. She said she needed them to mend a bonnet for the neighbor’s girl, and I was fast, and tricky, and we did not have much money—she knew that I’d be able to find them without spending a single copper.

“While I was gone," he continued, braiding quickly, then slowly, making it just right, "my mother used magic to light all the candles in the whole cottage. My father had been absent for many years. Even I barely remembered his face. In ink and parchment, she wrote the story of a girl who had no legs to walk, and, in all of her pining, grew wings and learned to fly. But she was unhappy. For wings, it turned out, had been too much. She knew right away that should have merely wished for her legs, or for a friend, or perhaps even a simple lover. She had been hasty in her desire to fly, and so she chose to lie down in a cave instead, and she wasted away until death found her, slowly. But she was not alone. For there were bears and glow worms that lit the way in that cave as she slept there, and she knew this as she went, like a song stuck in her head. She died, happily.

“When I returned to our cottage with the scissors, my mother put them into a gray velvet bag, and then she handed me a stack of pages as light as air—her story of the winged girl and the bears and death in the earth—and while she went out again to water the roses, she told me to carry them both to the neighbor who, it turned out, did not need a bonnet mended at all, but who had only just endured the death of her husband at the hands of war. The scissors, she said, were a symbol of agency. With scissors, you can cut the curtains into new patterns, sew them into a cloak or pillowcase. Or you can merely rip the seams in a jacket that has been too tight forever. The story was just my mother’s mind. She liked happy endings, and she liked girls with wings. She thought the story might ease the woman’s heart. For even if there are only worms and beasts left to guide you, she said, one can choose her own ending. And as long as there is a choice, then death needn't be lonely at all."

He had finished now. The braids soft, even, like gauze around her head. Sene felt to them eagerly. She was dazed by the story. It seemed so big, so important and yet, so small. Then again, it was Solas. She spun all the way around to face him. “What does it mean?” she said.

“It could mean a lot of things," he said. "For example, that nothing is simple, Isene. You think you are doing one thing, but really, it is another.”

“Is this about the Temple?” she said.

“Do you want it to be?”

“Maybe. What about you?”

He was undoing the braids now. The pins falling. Already. It was fast. He was focused on her, on her hair, and he undid his own creation with a careful kind of worship, each new piece  gracing her shoulders as an offering.

“I almost lost you,” he said as he took out another pin, another braid.

"I know," she said.

But then, he faltered, put his warm, hard, healed hand on her cheek. “It was enough to break me," he said. "It fucked me up. made me…question. Everything I knew.”

“What does that have to do with the story, Solas?” she said.

“Because it can also be about starting over. Can it not? Now, you are questioning, vhenan. Everything you knew. That is what happened in the rotunda.”

“Yes.”

He had to close his eyes, catch himself. Suddenly, something changed. He shook out his head as if ridding his mind of some terrible omen.

"Solas?"

“It is a lot sometimes,” he said.

“What’s wrong?” She picked up his face, found his eyes. “Solas, I know something’s wrong.”

"I am fine."

"No, you're not," she said. "You can tell me anything. It's just _me_."

“I’m a little frightened, Isene,” he said finally. It was a great, brute confession, seeming to take a great deal out of him. He looked down. He tipped his head into her chest, his hands melting away from her face and back to her hair, which he held to gently, then harder, then clutching. “I am afraid I will not be able to choose when the time comes.”

“Choose what?” she said.

He was shaking his head again. “Anything,” he said. “I am a man possessed.”

She crawled into his lap, knees on either side of him, hugged him hard. “It’s okay,” she said. “Solas, it’s okay.”

“Is it?” he said. "Truly?"

“ _Yes._ ”

She held him there, hard, for a while, quiet. She had her eyes closed, her chin pressed to the top of his head. There was nothing but the sound of their breathing, the fire, the wind outside. She did not rush him. She was overcome with the need to comfort him, to wait, patiently, as he gathered himself. She loved him so much. It took hold of her, made her steady, for him. It is true: There was a small sadness growing inside of Sene. A seed. With every passing moment, she remembered more clearly what Morrigan had said to her in the garden. The heavy dark. The silence. There was something he was not telling her. She was worried, yes. The speechlessness, the dreamy nothings in his voice, the fear, his breath as she held him there. But he was still strong. And still hers. They’d grown so close. It was almost impossible to fathom. Everything he gave to her, he gave in earnest. And now, she knew his heart. It had been ruins once, but he invited her inside, and she planted flowers in the garden, hung curtains in all the windows. It became her home.

Finally, he was calm. He dropped his chin to his chest. “I’m sorry,” he said.

"It's okay," she said.

“The Temple—perhaps it got to me, too. More than I realized."

“So much happened,” she said, caressing the skin behind his ears. “We never really talked about it until now.”

“No, we did not.”

She felt then, his hands loosening their grip in her hair, folding through the last of the braids, pulling them out slowly. She could hear the pins hitting the floor. He pulled her hair only just, tilting her head back, and then he brought his mouth to her neck, then to her ear, then to her cheek, and then he kissed her. His hands tangled in the curls, and now in her shirt as it bunched to her shoulders, and then it was off, and then his was off, too. The both of them, caught together in a brand new maelstrom.

“The bed,” he said as he kissed her, his breathing deep, heavy. He said it again, “The bed, vhenan.”

She got to her feet, but then it was like he didn’t want to let her go. He clung to her, trying to drag her back down to the floor with him. It almost made her laugh—it was so surprising. “The bed is over there,” she said.

He stopped abruptly, realizing what was going on, looked up. She was smiling down at him, her hair loose, free, the deep red tangles hanging in her face. He got up quickly, swept her into his arms and then he set her down on the bed, and as he undid her buttons for the second time that day, pushed up her knees, and buried his face between her legs, he thought he heard her say—“It’s supposed to be _your_ turn—” and she was playful, but he was not, and then her breath was catching, and she threw her head back into the sheets, found a pillow, drew it over her face. She was already there. She came so quickly, he didn’t know when to stop, so he kept going, and then she came again, this time rattling to the headboard, legs shaking, her body just a bolt of fast, red lightning, there and then gone, but fizzling, hard. He finished her, slowly, let her knees fall on either side of him, then he climbed up so that he could get rid of the pillow, see her face. He dried his mouth on the heel of his hand, the taste, the smell of her making him dizzy, then he waited patiently for her to come back down again, to open her eyes.

When finally she did, he said, “Wow.”

“Are you trying to kill me?” she said, then she laughed, but she was so spent and out of breath she could barely get out the sound.

“Certainly not,” he said. “I just can’t help myself.”

“No kidding,” she said, sitting up then, feeling melty and exalted but deeply determined, and she braced her hands to his shoulders and pressed him to his back on the bed. He went down easy, dreamy, holding her wrists in his hands, then threading them both through her hair. “ _Ame diane or’enaste,_ ” she said, spreading kisses across his chest and wasting no time. She tugged him out of his pants, took hold of him softly, and heard the breath go out of his lungs. She watched him close his eyes, felt his muscles relax, felt him let go, watched his hands fall limp at his sides. “Your turn, vhenan.”

 

It was in the very early morning purple that Solas heard a knock on the door. He was already awake, but he’d been drifting again, and now Sene stirred, a warm animal burrowed into the bedsheets beside him. He put a hand on her head, shushed her back to sleep. She smiled, half-dreaming, then nuzzled back into the pillow, red hair in pieces, everywhere.

The knocking, again. He tugged on his pants, his shirt. The fire was a dull wish, the room chilly. “Coming,” he said softly.

When he opened the door, it was Leliana. She was casual, unhooded, her red hair tied back tight, and she looked concerned.

“Leliana,” said Solas. “What is it?”

“Is the Inquisitor asleep?” she said.

“Yes,” he said, entering the hallway, closing the door behind him. “I’d prefer to let her stay that way. Though you look quite serious. Is everything all right?”

“I suppose you can handle this for now,” she said. Then, she handed him a piece of parchment. In her other hand, she carried a blue paper file. “It’s Warden Blackwall. He’s gone. We found this note in the stables this morning.”

Solas studied her, the pucker between her eyebrows as she waited. Then, he looked down to the note. Working his fingers into his temples—he was developing a headache. They’d been up late, and he was thirsty.

“How is your hand?” said Leliana.

“Hmm?” he said, looking up from the parchment.

She gestured to it—the one he’d been using to rub out the headache. He held it out between them. "Oh," he said. "It's fine. Thank you."

“Stories of how you clobbered that Red Templar in the Arbor Wilds have been spreading through Skyhold like wildfire,” she said.

"Is that right?" he said. _Sera,_ he thought.

“A mage getting his hands dirty?" she laughed. "Some of our soldiers were already wary of your apostate status. I suspect they're even more afraid of you now.”

This intrigued him. He raised his eyebrows, knowing. "Very good," he said, finishing the note, then handing it back. "This letter reads like a fairly permanent goodbye, Leliana. What else do you have?"

"My agents have uncovered information that leads me to believe Blackwall has gone to Val Royeaux.”

“For what purpose?”

“The execution of a man named Cyril Mornay. He was involved in an assassination plot some years ago, though the nature of Blackwall's connection to Mornay is unclear. The situation requires further investigation.”

In Val Royeaux, you mean," said Solas.

"Whether Blackwall plans on coming back to the Inquisition or not, being a member of the Inquisitor's inner circle gave him access to privileged information. The circumstances here are...fishy, at best. We cannot risk his compromise."

"I understand," he said. "When is the execution."

“Tonight,” she said. “Sundown.”

 _Tonight._ The breath went out of him all at once, and he glanced, weary, back to the door. He did not want to have to tell her this. He put his hands on his hips, hung his head. “Very well,” he said. “I’ll inform Sene the moment she wakes.”

“I'm sorry, Solas,” said Leliana, slipping the note back into the file under her arm. “I know you've only just returned from the Arbor Wilds."

"It is not your fault, Leliana."

"Who else should I notify?"

“Sene will want to bring Sera,” he said. “She and Blackwall are quite close.”

“I believe she’s asleep in the Undercroft.”

“No surprise there,” said Solas. "Get Cassandra as well. Let the Iron Bull rest. And if you would please—I have a meeting with Dorian scheduled this morning. Just make sure he knows I won't be there."

“I will see to it.”

“Thank you, Leliana.” He smiled, low, opened the door, set one foot inside.

“Solas,” she said.

"Yes?” He turned his head to look at her, his hand on the doorjamb.

“I just—how is she?" said Leliana. "The Inquisitor. After everything that happened in the Arbor Wilds?"

Solas was not quite sure how to put it simply. “She is...processing,” he said. “We all are.”

“Of course,” said Leliana. “I read your reports. Anyway, I will let you get back to her. I only wanted to check."

“She would appreciate it,” he said, smiling.

She nodded, grateful. Then she hurried down the stairs.

When he got back inside, he saw her waking. So long, her naked, freckled limbs stretching outside the blankets. She reached for him, instinctually, and when he wasn’t there, she pushed up off the bed, looked around, nearly frantic. “Solas?” she said.

“I’m here," he said, going to her. He warmed his hand to her waist, the dip and the shallow, a comfort.

She calmed, kissed his knee. Then, she looked confused. "Why are you dressed?" she said. "Was someone here?"

"Leliana," he said.

"What's wrong?"

"There is news," he said. "I'm afraid time has found us once again, vhenan."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Elven translations:
> 
> “Ara vhen'an,” he said. “Ju'aman nar numin, Isene.” - "My heart," he said. "I will catch your tears, Isene." 
> 
> “Ame diane or’enaste." - "I am thankful."
> 
>  
> 
> (For more detailed breakdowns of these translations, plus interpretive notes, visit my work [The Dead Season: Full Elvhen Translations](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7477965/chapters/18341173))


	21. It's raining in Val Royeaux.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Arrival in Val Royeaux. Josephine has put together an elaborate plan to free Blackwall...among other things. Solas and Sene steal time, once again.

It was getting dark earlier and earlier those days. The seasons were changing.

Solas stood with Cassandra outside the jail, leaning against the pale brick of the building. It was raining outside. They had to huddle beneath a blue awning, dressed in Inquisition uniform, presented as traveling dignitaries more than anything. They had not come to Val Royeaux for a fight. Still, a small squad of Inquisition soldiers stood by in protective capacity. Most of the townspeople had dispersed after Blackwall’s interruption, but many still stood around in little clusters, like gems, glancing at Solas and Cassandra, whispering in their Orlesian accents beneath the wide, clandestine brims of their colorful umbrellas.

_Lady Pentaghast—the hair is always dreadful._

_Is that the the apostate lover…? He is so tall! Taller than an elf should be, I think.  
_

_And her boots. Maker be._

_I believe I remember that elven man from the ball. Handsome, no? Despite the ears._

_Madame! Shh. Or they will hear you._

_Do I mind? Is this something that I mind?  
_

_It should be!  
_

“What do you think she will do, Solas?” said Cassandra, looking down at her feet, the great, solemn boots that she wore. It had been a while since he had really talked to Cassandra. She'd been buried in paperwork, preparations, gathering support for her candidacy to Divine. Only he could not tell if she truly wanted it. In any case, she seemed particularly out of sorts that day, frazzled, like a child who had been cooped up in the house for too long.

“Sene does not leave her men behind,” said Solas. “She won't let Blackwall die here. I’m just not sure what it will cost.”

“I hate this place,” said Cassandra, scuffing her boot across the wet cobble street.

“I can tell,” said Solas. “You’ve been bristling all evening.”

“It’s just these _people,_ ” she said.

“Ignore them,” he said, smiling, nodding at an onlooker _—_ a woman in a high, ruffled collar who promptly looked away. “I do.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” she said. “They don’t know what to make of you. For me, however, there are expectations.”

“I have never known you to be a woman concerned with expectations, Cassandra.”

“I am not concerned,” she said. “I am merely annoyed.”

“Well, at least that makes sense.”

“How are you?” she said. “How is Sene? After the Arbor Wilds, things seemed…strained. Not between you, just in general.”

“Strained is not the right word,” said Solas, studying the back of his hand, forming it into a fist. “Confused would be better. I’m not sure I can explain.”

“Of course,” she said. “I don’t mean to pry."

"You're not prying. It's just _—_ there are complications," said Solas, for some reason feeling extraordinarily open that day. It was easy, talking to Cassandra. "The Temple was a tricky place."

"So I've heard," said Cassandra. "As long as everything is all right."

“It is,” said Solas, growing detached now, staring up at the sky. The gray and the green, holding him. He liked the rain. It reminded him of Sene, making the world feel vulnerable, new, wide open as if anything could happen. It smelled good. It was everywhere. He put his hands in his pockets.

“What are you thinking, Solas? You have a look.”

He turned his head to look at her. It was a bold question for Cassandra. Like him, she was masterful with her guard, but underneath, there was a lot of give. “I was thinking about Sene,” he said. “If we’re being perfectly honest.”

“I—” she faltered. “That is…”

“Yes?”

“I feel like a fool.”

“You’re not a fool, Cassandra. What is it?”

“I just—I think it’s so romantic,” she blurted finally, blushing hard—it was terribly endearing. “You and Sene. The Apostate and the Herald. It's like _—_ it's like something out of a book. I’m sorry. I’m babbling. Forget I ever said this.”

This made him laugh. “I never forget," he said. "Besides, you're right. It is, of course, very romantic."

“When we first arrived at the Breach, and at Haven, I know I did not supply you with much trust, Solas.”

“It is understandable,” said Solas. “I am an apostate. Who trusts an apostate?”

“Well, me,” she said, looking at her boots again. “I do. Now.”

He looked out, across the rainy sweet of Val Royeaux. Without the sun, the reds and the blues of the bazaar were like cold hands, drawing him deep into the world, surprising him. Again. Those days, he seemed to live in a constant state of surprise. “Thank you, Cassandra,” he said.

Together, they stood, existing, listening to the rain.

 

“You’re going to get him out, right?” said Sera. “What he did was bad. And stupid. But you can’t just _leave_ him here, Quiz. Right?"

Sene stood in the doorway, reading through Leliana’s report. The revelation about Blackwall had troubled Sera. Unlike Solas and Cassandra, she had insisted on attending the meeting with Cullen and Josephine inside the jail. Sene was tired, flustered. She'd had to wake up too early that morning, and she'd been riding horses all day, and her braids were really, really tight.

“I will not leave one of my men to rot at the mercy of Orlais," she said after a while, closing the report, handing it back to Cullen. "That is not how this works. I want him released.”

“They won’t be happy,” said Cullen. He looked ragged as well. The entire affair was proving to be more trying than most of them had anticipated. “You have no idea how many Orlesians want to see Rainier swinging from the end of that rope.”

Sene rolled her eyes, spectacularly unconcerned. “And what of the attention span of these _Orlesians,_ Commander? They can be persuaded.” She looked to Josephine. “Give me something, Josephine. Anything. There must be a way to do this without storming the city and taking Blackwall by force.”

Josephine sighed, looking a little windswept, a little loose at the seams. She had her hair down, pulled off her face with a single, rose gold pin. “Walk with me, Inquisitor.”

 

They left the jail. With a small guard of Inquisition soldiers, they maneuvered through the crowds at a brisk pace, heading for the docks. The night smelled fresh in the rain, full of nature, and the air was cool. Sene looked around, but it was dark, and she did not see Solas. She walked with her arms crossed tightly to her chest. She felt exhausted. She felt like her bones were made of lead. She wanted to go home.

“I understand your frustration, Inquisitor,” said Josephine as they approached the docks. “I know you were hoping for more...time. At Skyhold. I have heard only trying tales of your feat at the Arbor Wilds."

“Thanks," she said.

They both leaned against the railings, looking out at the crash and swell of the Waking Sea. Moonlight on water, in a place like this. It had a way of invoking more romance than Sene preferred to acknowledge. Josephine spoke candidly, softly. "I have good news," she said. "I think. If that makes you feel any better."

"What is it, Josephine? What do we have to do?"

“Since the ball at the Winter Palace," she said, "the Inquisition has gathered many friends and admirers in the Orlesian Court. You have charmed them, Inquisitor. In this particular case, I speak of Comtesse Letitia Barrande. A patron of the arts and openly sympathetic to our cause, Comtesse Barrande also holds personal influence over the judge in charge of Blackwall’s—er, _Rainier’s_ —case. She has agreed to work with us on one small condition.”

Sene sighed, heavy, placing her head into her hands. “What do we have to do to win the favor of Comtesse Letitia Barrande?”

“The Comtesse has invited us to a dinner tomorrow night, at her private residence in the hills outside of Val Royeaux."

"A dinner?"

"Yes. Attend the dinner, and the Comtesse will compel the judge to free Blackwall—er, _Rainier—_ to Inquisition custody as soon as possible.”

Sene looked up. Josephine had bright, cat eyes in the moonlight. She was pretty and wise, but she was young, too. Not as young as Sene, but still. Young. “That can't be it," said Sene. "I know there's more."

“Well,” said Josephine. “There are certain...stipulations attached. Leliana, Cullen, and I, along with Cassandra and Sera, will all be attending the dinner on diplomatic duty, in uniform. The party is an annual affair. There will be many important people in attendance, and it is only proper that the Inquisition be numbered among them.”

“What about Solas and me?”

“That is the true catch,” she said. “You and Solas will be attending the dinner as…honored guests, Inquisitor. This exists outside your duties to the Inquisition. For the two of you, it is a social call.”

Sene folded her hands together on the railing. She tried to envision everything entailed by attending a _social call_ with a comtesse. She had no idea where to begin. “A social call," she said. "Why just us?"

"The Comtesse is...a romantic, Inquisitor. She enjoys a good love story. Let us leave it at that for now."

“Right," said Sene. "My life, a _good love story_ invented purely for the consumption of an Orlesian _Comtesse._ "

"Please, Inquisitor," said Josephine, but she was smiling. "I understand your cynicism at this point. You and Solas have been through far too much already. But I assure you. This does not have to be unpleasant."

"I'm an elf, Josephine. I've never been on a _social call_ with a Comtesse. How will this possibly be pleasant?"

"Well, for starters," she said. "We will dress you up. Him as well. The food and wine will be excellent. In any case, this is a prime opportunity. It is our best chance at achieving a diplomatic solution to the problem at hand."

"Doesn’t this Comtesse care that she’ll be dining in the honored company of an apostate?" said Sene. "This can’t be good for her reputation.”

"The Comtesse is well aware of Solas’s situation,” said Josephine. “She, personally, has no qualms with the concept of apostasy. Again, she is a romantic."

Sene sighed. "Of course."

"Needless to say," said Josephine, "her husband, Comte Michel Barrande, is less than thrilled with the invitation, and he is not alone. Though, for once, I believe we can use their disapproval to our advantage. The people of Orlais do not know Solas. They know only that he is an apostate, though some rumors of your love affair, in addition to his certain...prowess on the battlefield have inevitably begun to circulate. I think that with Solas's full cooperation, plus a bit of planted gossip, we could do more here than just secure Blackwall's release. We could forge a powerful, more steady ally in the Comtesse, as well as elevate Solas's status a bit, making him more...palatable, if you will."

Sene looked up. This was a strange word. "Palatable? Why would that matter?"       

“Because, Inquisitor. _Think_ of the possibilities. If we succeed at this, the two of you could be seen together, in public, in a more permanently dignified fashion. No more whispers of scandal. No more concern about an unknown apostate at the right hand of the Inquisitor’s throne. Right now, Solas’s reputation is…blank, at best. After tomorrow, all that could change.”

“So, your plan isn't just about freeing Blackwall. It's about us, too?” said Sene.

“Partially, yes. Of course, it would make my job easier if your relationship were validated in the eyes of the Orlesian Court, but I also think it would just be…nice. It would give you space, freedom. So that the next time we have to attend one of these sticky affairs, Solas can escort you out in the open, and we do not have to worry about whose reputation we’ll be offending in the meantime.”

Sene felt her cheeks grow warm, her throat tight. She put her hands on her head, an impulse brought on be the extreme self-consciousness she often felt in moments like this. "You've thought of everything," she said, smiling still. "Thank you, Josephine."

“This is my job, Inquisitor. There is no need to thank me. I will talk to Solas personally tomorrow about what the night’s affairs may…require of him. Knowing his particular talents, I don’t foresee it being too much of a problem.”

“His _particular talents_?” said Sene.

“Inquisitor,” said Josephine, a knowing smile. “Solas is, despite his obvious arrogance…quite charming, is he not? He carries himself very well for a man of no formal training. Surely, you of all people have noticed.”

Sene scratched at the back of her head. "Oh," she said. "That." The braids. She wanted them out. She'd done them herself that day, but it had been a while. She'd gotten so used to Solas's braids—looser, messier. She couldn't believe she'd used to wear them this tight on a regular basis. "Of course I’ve noticed. Solas has a lot of confidence in these types of situations. But…try not to call him arrogant to his face. It’s just—he gets pouty when people call him arrogant.”

“Really?” said Josephine. “I would not have pegged Solas as a man who cares one way or another what other people think of him.”

“He cares what _certain_ people think of him,” said Sene. “But he's very guarded, so I understand why so many people get that wrong.”

“Hmm.” Josephine opened the blue paper file on her clipboard. Sene watched her scribble the words _Solas cares_ at the bottom of a densely worded page. “That is very good to know, Inquisitor. Perhaps I should pick your brain a bit more on our Solas before tomorrow night’s affair. He is so…mysterious, after all."

Sene shrugged, smiled. “Not to me,” she said, relaxing now, just to think of him. “Not anymore.”

“Of course,” said Josephine, they turned their backs to the churning water now, heading away from the docks. The moon was out, bright and big and delicious, like a piece of fruit. “We can talk more tomorrow. Tonight, we will be residing in the guest wing of the Boisvert Mansion. The Comte owes us a favor after I rescued him from that…armoire not too long ago. He is delighted to have us.”

“That sounds fine,” said Sene. “But wait, Josephine.”

"Yes?”

“How are you?” she said. "I've been meaning to ask."

Josephine paused. She’d been walking out ahead, as usual, her coat tails swinging back and forth, but now, she looked back. “I am fine, Inquisitor."

“I just, I heard something. About you and Warden Blackwall. I didn’t know if maybe—”

“It is nothing,” said Josephine, stern, flustered, but still somehow deeply poised. She brought a hand through her hair, removed the pin. "I would rather not speak of it. If it is all the same to you. But I can assure you, Inquisitor, that this will not in any way interfere with my ability to oversee tomorrow night's affair."

"I know," said Sene. "I believe you. I only wanted to check in."

"Very good," said Josephine, smiling, but only just. She turned on her heels as Sene followed, always at a brisk pace.

 

That night, in their private quarters at the Boisvert Mansion, Sene and Solas were so goddam tired that it was all they could do to get into soft clothes and curl into one another. The couch at the center of the room was so big and blue it felt like swimming, and the fire seemed dressed up with magic, undying, throwing shadows like silent mischief on the walls. Solas took down her braids. "They're so tight," he said, and he brushed her hair and rubbed her scalp until she almost melted into his lap. At her request, he told melodic stories of the Fade. He hadn't done that in such a long time, but back in Haven it was one of the things that had drawn her to him the most. His ability to talk, forever. So good. The poetry, the pretty words all in a row.

Before long, however, he fell silent, and then he fell asleep with his arms heavy around her, his head fitted to the hollow of her neck. She was so endeared by this. It was almost too much when she had to budge him, gently, as her arm was trapped and falling asleep, and she wanted bedsheets. She wanted pillows. His eyes heaved open, heavy and lit, a drowsy smile, and she led him to the bed where she threw back the covers and watched him climb to the pillow, collapse. She crawled into his arms. He pulled the covers over them both—these big, plush blankets the color of veilfire—pushed the hair off her neck and sighed. “Goodnight, Isene,” he said, very low and quiet, and then, as a whisper, he was gone. She let him go, his breath hot and even, his pulse thrumming to her wrists as he held her there. It was not their bed, but it was big and soft and the brass posts were pretty. And as she drifted off, she tried not to think of Blackwall or the worn gray stones of his heart or the sadness or the party. She had so much forgiveness. Inside of her. There was so much to give. She did not worry. She knew that everything would be okay.

 

The next morning, she and Solas met with Josephine for a long discussion about the night to come. They had lunch outside, beneath a red umbrella in the Summer Bazaar. The sky was still gray, still rainy, but it was the kind of weather that swept right through with sunlight biting on its heels. You could feel it, burning off through the clouds. Sene wore her hair down, combed through, pinned back behind her ears. Solas held her hand, sipped his coffee, listening to Josephine with intent. She wanted them seen together in public prior to the dinner, as she did not wish to cause a sensation. That’s at least part of what the lunch was about. Sene had grown nervous. She had not been at the center of such intense scrutiny since Halamshiral, and at least then, she got to wear a uniform, her hair back. No fussing.

Josephine wore a long, pale blue dress that day, her hair slicked back, clean and elegant. She looked better rested than the day before, but still uneasy, and she had been very busy the entire lunch. Messengers kept flocking to her side, bringing her small squares and scrolls of brown paper. She would unfold them, sigh, exasperated, then scribble her response. The same messenger would return, take the note, and disappear once more.

“Your performance at the party tonight is only half the battle," she said finally, taking a bit of tea, grimacing. "Too hot. Anyway. What I mean to say is that while your attendance is enough to secure Blackwall's release on its own, remember that it is not enough to influence your reputation, Solas. Many of the party's attendees will be very suspicious of your presence."

"I can only imagine," he said. "What else are you proposing, Josephine? I already know what I have to do."

"Well, Sera and Leliana are, as we speak, spreading whispers through the Court of your various…conquests,” she said.

“My conquests?” said Solas. “Of which _conquests_ do they speak?"

“Stories of your bravado on the battlefield.”

“Ah.”

“Many Orlesians are very interested in the idea of a mage who is not afraid to bloody his hands a little bit. The notion is, again…romantic. Therefore, stories of you targeting Red Templars with your fists rather than your staff have taken center stage.”

“I understand your tactics,” said Solas, “but I am not a brute. I won’t act like one.”

“Nobody is asking you to change your persona in any way, Solas. You might, in fact, do the opposite. By this, I mean, _turn up your charm_. While it may seem crude, we _want_ you to appear intimidating, but remember, in order for this to work, you must also be likable."

"Yes. I understand."

"In any case, the stories are being handled with finesse, Solas, and they are nearly all true, just with a few exaggerations attached. You needn't be concerned."

“These exaggerations," said Solas. "If Sera's involved, they're bound to be...interesting. Do I even want to know?"

“Probably not.”

"What about me?” said Sene, looking around, feeling hot in her cheeks. "Sorry, I just—we haven't talked about me yet. What's expected of me."

“You should act just like you,” said Josephine, smiling, warm. Another messenger came around, left a scroll of parchment on top of a plate of fine china. Deeply annoyed, Josephine picked it up, crumpled it inside her fist, and dropped it to the ground. Then, upon looking to Sene, immediately softened. “The Orlesian Court adores you, Inquisitor. The way you handled Dutchess Florianne at the masquerade will be extolled for ages to come. The one thing I would advise strongly, however, is for neither of you to shy away from one another in terms of…public display. I don’t mean christening any broom closets—just…touch, as you normally would. We want everyone to know exactly what you mean to each other.”

"Ah, yes," said Solas, weaving his hand through Sene's fingers, bringing them to his lips. “The intrigue of two deeply charmed, star-crossed elven lovers, standing side-by-side, bravely, to face a twisted, immortal Magister as the world burns in his wake. I believe we can handle it from here.”

“I’ve no doubt.”

“How much time do we have?”

“Not much,” she said. “You’re expected at the tailor’s within the hour for final alterations, though I believe there is enough time for you to walk the bazaar a bit. Show yourselves. Expect whispers, but remember, it is all part of the plan.”

Sene and Solas both stood from the table. Sene smoothed both hands over her hair. “Josephine,” she said. “Please. How is Blackwall?”

“Blackwall is…he is fine,” she said. “I saw him this morning.”

“They’re treating him well?” said Solas.

“As well as can be expected, I suppose.” She nodded, stayed seated, and returned to her work. "Go, the two of you. I will see you soon."

 

They met with speed after that, disappearing almost immediately from the bazaar, and finding themselves deep in an alley between two buildings. Sene had several guards follow, keeping watch at the entrance, backs turned so that she could be alone with him. Entirely alone. The walls were tall on all sides, just a sliver of gray sky overhead.

“There will be very little escaping tonight,” he said to her as they huddled there, alone. “We’ll have to be _on_. All night. Do you understand?”

“I know,” she said. "I know."

“But it will be fine, Isene. I know how you get nervous. Just remember. You have already won them over. This time, it is me they’ll be watching.”

“You’ll be okay, right? I mean, I know your good at this kind of thing, I just—we don't have to do this.”

He smiled, very still, his knuckles lingering at her jaw, the slant of her ear. “I’ll manage,” he said. “Just try and remember to take my lead, Inquisitor. It is very important tonight that my…particular confidence come through.”

“You mean your arrogance?” she said, smirking. Like he would.

“Yes,” he said, “my arrogance.”

She pressed into him then, until his back sank to the wall. "I'm kidding," she whispered.

"I know, vhenan."

She could feel his hands in her hair now, a compulsion with him. He could not help himself. She got up on her tip-toes to kiss him, first slow, then harder. She had not intended for this, but now, she had his smell in her head and on hands, and she could think of nothing else. As he pulled her hair in handfuls, she lost composure, began loosening the buttons at his waist, and then she reached for him, pulled him heavy and tight into her hand until he shuddered and, on instinct, put his mouth on her ear. He was full hard in what seemed like an instant, flushed, his face now gone to her neck. She glanced to where the guards stood at the top of the alley, backs turned, her forehead pressed to his lips.

“Can I?” she said.

“ _Avise'ain_ ,” he growled. “You know I want you to, but is this wise?”

She paused, loosened her grip. “Tell me to stop,” she said, serious, “and I’ll stop.”

She looked up, could see him now, a little desperate, his breath scant. He looked to the guards as well—their great, heavy backs. As she watched him, she knew that he knew they were alone, but she also knew, and so did he: this was Val Royeaux. Things were rarely as they seemed. Still, when he looked back, his eyes were steel grit, and ready. He pulled his hand down the length of her arm, formed it to her wrist. He lowered his mouth to her ear. “Yes,” he said.

She reaffirmed her grip, drawing a grunt as he closed his eyes once more. Then, she pressed her other hand to his shoulder, straightening him up a little bit. She wanted to see his whole face as she held him.

“Look at me,” she said, softly.

Both hands back inside her hair, he obliged. “I see you, Isene,” he said, ragged as she groped him, his eyes holding hard as fierce objects, lost and armored to all but _her._

She glanced one last time to the guards, then she felt his hands surrender their grip on her hair as she lowered to her knees. She felt him brace his back to the wall as she began, and she was hungry for him in new ways, ways brought on by the city and the rain and the scheming, their plan. He was tugging now to the backs of her ears, then losing his hold completely, and his gasps were low and cool and drawing her excitement deep. Using one hand to brace his hips to the wall, and the other gliding with her mouth, she went slow, teased, then faster, fuller, harder. He tasted the same as he always did and yet, it was different somehow—when she was this eager, when she poured her focus into him this hard. Usually, she was not quite so intent, but when she was, it did not take long. Somewhere along the line, she had learned that the element of surprise always put Solas over the edge, really fast. Whatever his life had been before, he was used to control. So this was how she undid him. As he came, his voice broke, and she could feel him losing his balance, throbbing in her hand, his fingers tangled in her hair and pulling himself deeper as she drew it out of him, long and hard, the faintest hint of whimper. She slowed down as he finished, lingered, and she swallowed all of him and let her lips graze at the tip—just for a moment—until she felt him shudder, escape, and then finally she fell away and sat back on her heels, jaw tired, and caught her breath, wiped her mouth on her sleeve, feeling the wet between her legs—all of her own need, she would save up for later.

It was slow then, groggy. He held out his hand, helped her to her feet. Chin sunk to his chest, eyes closed, he slowly began to put himself back together. She helped him with the buttons, smoothed his shirt, straightened his collar. When he opened his eyes and saw her there, bright, smiling, flushed, very pleased with herself, the green eyes, freckles crisp and red hair undone to the rainy season, he suddenly didn’t understand. The sex always drew it out of him somehow, the truth, but this wasn’t just sex. Yes, he had always known this. But he’d never been able to articulate why. He’d been too lost, too far gone, intoxicated by the smell, the touch of her, the way she made him feel. It had been too much at times, a constant surprise. The sex was an important part of her, yes—the physical part, something hard and like fire to make him aware, because it had been such a long time. But there was something more with her, too, and he could see it now, acknowledge it, something whole and beautiful. Like making a mark on this world—he, a part of it, and she, his first, last, and one true connection. All of it, a seed.

He knew it had to do with what had happened in the Emprise du Lion, and even amidst the loss he still could barely find it inside himself to acknowledge, the possibilities it held were starting to become clear. Because of this, the change in him was finally rising to the surface. In that moment, he could feel the Veil, prickling at his eyelashes, his nose, the skin on his own freckled cheeks. He took her face into his hand, felt weak. _Wanted_ to feel weak. And in that moment, here, hidden deep in an alley in Val Royeaux, rain clouds overhead, looking into her eyes. He almost told her.

“We should go,” she said, holding his wrists. “My hair is getting big with the humidity. I have no idea what they're going to want to do to it for the party.”

“Hold on,” he said softly, pulling her closer, touching his forehead to hers. “Stay. I will fix your hair. Stay, vhenan. Just a little longer.”

She smiled at this, sighed into him and released her head to his chest, and she had been right about her hair—it _was_ growing. Reaching, tickling his chin and his neck. He knew he was good at this, good at being with her. He had swept her away again. He made her happy. It was so easy to make her stay. All he had to do was ask. And she never held back, so unafraid. She did not question. She demanded nothing but his love, in earnest. How could it be so simple for her? How did she love so truly and yet, so strong? No confusion, no fear. She gave him _everything._ He was not sure he deserved it, and yet, he wanted to be worthy. And he was overcome then with the need to put his hands on the skin of her back, feel the scar, remember. Maybe that would give him the courage.

But then, there was a voice.

“Hello?” said the voice. “Hello? Who is down there?”

They both looked up, in time. An old woman had her curly gray head sticking out of an open window, squinting down at them from about three stories up. She pressed a monocle to her eye, but it seemed apparent that she could not see. Not really. The image of her, up there, hanging over the windowsill, was so comical, it brought them both very starkly into the strange light of day, anxious, exhilarated, the gold and colors of the world around them untamed. Again, rain fell. Just sprinkles, but time had returned to the alley.

“We’ll be on our way, madame!” shouted Solas, facing the rain.

“I should hope so, young man! This is no place for scandal!”

“She can’t see us, right?” said Sene. “Like, she has no idea it’s _us_?”

“No, I don’t think so,” said Solas. “But we should probably go, in either case.”

“Agreed.”

They hurried from the alley. Once they got to the end, the raindrops were bigger, splatty, and Sene knocked on the shoulder of one of the four Inquisition soldiers standing guard. He nodded, acknowledging, and moved to one side. Holding hands, she and Solas came out into the open. They could sense now, the sun pushing through the clouds, warming the air, and yet, the rain. It was weird, quiet in the bazaar, an odd time of day. Everybody was home now, getting dressed, getting washed, getting ready, putting on their ruffles and their feathers, their grand, unyielding masks in preparation for the night and whatever dreams it held in store.


	22. Man of Faith, Pt. 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sene, Solas, and the Inquisition entourage arrive at the Berrande estate outside Val Royeaux.

“Sol-arse,” said Sera, sitting on top of the piano. She was dressed and ready to go—the sound red, the blue sash. Though like Sene, he thought, she looked out of place in uniform. “Turn around. Let me get a look at you.”

“Contain yourself,” said Solas, standing in front of a tall mirror. He was on a low, round platform in the center of the room, which was otherwise largely empty and very white. This place had high ceilings, a gilded chandelier big as a dreadnought. He studied his reflection one last time. The tux was gray—a very pale, very silver gray. In terms of fashion, it was unique. Not particularly Orlesian, if only because it was so understated, but it was...something. Josephine had requested the cut herself—slim, lapels, white shirt, and a dusty blue satin tie embelished with gold thread in the shapes of deconstructed flowers and suns. The tie was bowed. The lapels were long, slick. No tails. Nothing too flashy. When he’d asked her why she chose the color, Josephine answered that it was a compliment to the eyes, and that the pale ensemble would make him appear both sensitive and bold. Most of the men of Orlais dressed in rich, loud colors. “As if they are compensating for something,” she said, and then she tsked. But Solas needed to appear sure of himself in every way, and part of that was an outfit both sumptuous and terribly subtle. Solas very much liked the tux, like being wrapped in a piece of winter sky, though the cost, he knew, must have been astronomical. He smoothed his hands one last time over the lapels and turned around on the platform to face Sera. “All right,” he said. “Now. How do I look, Sera? Be honest.”

“Oh, quit your smirking,” she said. “I’m not blind, and neither are you. Right dashing, for once in your life. And...well...” she trailed off, getting sort of dreamy.

“Yes?” he said.  
“Right. It’s like, you’ve got this...it’s extra...tall. You’ve got it. Extra.” “Extra tall?” he said.

“Yeah. The silver it’s like...there’s a tall thing. Right...there. Right there above your head.” She poked her finger into the nothing space above his head. “You’re already tall for an elf, Solas. Now you’re really tall for an elf.”

“Well, that’s good. I suppose.” “Pft.”

“I’ll admit,” he said, adjusting his cufflinks—a sort of prized silver like the buttons on his shirt, tiny, elegant lions with their fangs out. “I’m a little surprised you’re here. I thought you’d want to be with Sene on the other side of that wall.”

“I was,” she said. “But I just—I thought you could use some company. Sene’s got Cass and Josie and Leliana. Commander Cully’s all business as usual. You were all by your lonesome. So I thought, why not?”

He smiled, looking at her while she looked at her shoes. She’d had a way with him lately. This small, sneaky charm. “I appreciate that, Sera,” he said. “Now, I need you to tell me something.”

“You what?”

“What do the dignified, ennobled sycophants of Orlais think I did to that Templar in the Arbor Wilds?”

She laughed. “How should I know?” “Sera.”

"Sera,” she said, mocking him. “I see what you’re getting at. But all I did was feed a bit of bread to the servants. How it crumbles well, that’s their ish. Punched one. Froze one. Stabbed one in the heart. Ah, the elfy apostate! He’s so tall! Pft. All the same, yeah?”

“Hmm,” said Solas, stepping off the platform. “That is...very good, Sera. Because it’s not so much the stories themselves but the atmospheres they invoke. I am not a man tonight. I am...a symbol? A brand, if you will.”

“Right? You got it. It’s the buzzing, not the bees.” “We are not so far apart, you and I,” he said. “Yeah, well. Maybe,” she said.  
He only smiled at this.

Then, “Solas?” “Yes, Sera?”

She hopped off the piano. She was holding a pair of long, white gloves in her hands. They were his.

“What is it?” he said. "You look...concerned."

“Not concerned,” she said, handing him the gloves. “Just wigging. Trying to figure something out, you know?”

“Well,” he said. “Tell me more. Maybe I can help. I’ll try not to hurt your head.” “No, I just. Look, I know it seems weird.”  
“Sera—”

“But thanks.”

“Thanks?”

“Yes. Thanks. For doing this. For going out of your way. I’m sad about Blackwall—or, Thom— Rainy-thingy. Whatever. I wish he didn’t have to lie, but he did. And you. You don’t even know him that well, and yet, here you are. All silvery. Doing a thing you don’t want to just so he can have a second chance.”

“What happens to Blackwall once we get back to Skyhold will be for Sene to decide,” said Solas. “Not me.”

“I know that,” she said, hands behind her back, kicking invisible dust around on the floor. “I just —you didn’t have to say yes. That’s all I’m saying. I know I give you shit for the elfy stuff, and I give Quiz shit about you, but it’s all just a game, yeah? You saved her. You protect. You find bells and eat our stupid cookies. And you—you do all of these things, and none of them seem to be for you. I know it’s stupid and probably makes shit for sense, but it’s just—” She looked down. “You’re nice, okay? There I said it.”

Solas, incredulous, stood now with his hands in his pockets. He was staring at the top of her head, the scribbles of yellow hair combed as straight as she could get it. But she would always be a little mussed. “Thank you,” he said, softly. “No one’s ever really called me nice before.”

“Well, you are. So get over it.”

“I will," he said. "And know that you have my affection as well."

She looked up at him then, her eyes so big, and knowing, like water and smoke. “You mean that, elven man?”

This settled him, the energy between them. Made it real. He smiled. “Of course, lethal’lan."

They went outside to the bazaar. There were Inquisition soldiers everywhere it seemed. Lined up, a full escort to the carriages waiting at the gates. The rain had burned off, the clouds just a heavy, gray swell in the distance. It was warm and wet, even with the sun going down, and the air smelled clean of water and metal and stone. Solas stood tall, looked up. He felt proud. This city. Its steeples and grace. They all called to him through ten thousand pale and ancient memories, cobbled through time and dreaming.

He opened his eyes then, braced, as the rest of them approached in the sunlight. He put on his gloves, meticulous, adjusted his tie. He knew she would look beautiful. This was not a question. She was Sene, and for whatever reason—after the alley, the talk with Sera—it was all so terribly obvious to him now. His best friend with red hair. She held the piece, the flower, the scent. All of it, an anchor. He was eager to see her. He could feel it in his body. He had seen, felt, and been inside every part of her, and yet, after spending a single afternoon in separate rooms, being plucked and pruned for the sake of diplomacy, he missed her.

Sera stood very firmly at his side. She sort of bumped into him, her hands behind her back, mirroring his stance.

“So tall, you,” she said.  
But the moment Sene appeared, flanked by a uniformed Josephine, Cassandra, and Leliana, Sera was gone, running toward her, pulling her into a big hug. Both of them these long, lean elven women, all wrapped around each other like vines and branches.

Sene, he saw, was on her tip toes now, and as she pulled out of the hug, Sera started picking at her hair. At this, Josephine made several exasperated gestures of concern.

“Be careful of the Inquisitor’s hair,” she said to Sera. “Taming it was no easy task—” “Hush, you,” said Sera. “Quiz, you’re so green. Like a tall flower, you are.”

“A flower?” said Sene, laughing. “I feel more like a bootstring, to be honest.”

Then Sera moved aside, so that he could see her, in full. It was just fine. She looked just like Sene. Only she’d been brightened somehow, hastened into focus. She was coming toward him, and when she got close enough for him to touch, to smell, though he remained composed, he did lose his breath a little bit. It was unexpected. The colors of her, they sang. She seemed to be made of birds. Her red hair pulled back, off of her neck, a strategic mass of curls and braids and small, white flowers, and she wore a long, green satin dress with embroidered sleeves, the plunging neckline like a gut punch—a shock of skin amidst all that fabric and nature. His heart a great beast, captured in his chest, on impulse, he became deeply curious, and he wanted to study her like this, draw her, undress her, slowly. It was an old need that took him all the way back to the beginning. And though he knew that she was the same stuff as before, up close like this, wearing a dress, flowers in her hair, she seemed somehow new. He set a finger beneath chin, lifted it only just to get a better look at her face. She was self-conscious in the dress, he knew, but that’s just who she was, and he also knew that as the night wore on, she would find a way to wear it proudly. The color made her eyes into the stuff of enchanted canopies, all greens and glowy sun. He shook his head a little, briefly incredulous to the fact that, somehow, this creature was, of all things, his.

Sene, of course, read it all wrong. “What’s the matter?” she said, putting her hands on her head, feeling her hair.

Solas laughed. He couldn’t help it. It was always funny when she did this. He gathered her hands into his own, kissed them. “Inquisitor,” he said. He put his thumb across her cheekbone.

“Is my hair okay?” she said.

“Isene. Pretty girl. Atisha. Your hair is stunning, but try not to touch it, to mess it so soon. You’ll give Josephine a heart attack.”

She immediately smiled at this, calmed to him. Then, she put her face into his chest. “You smell really good right now,” she said, sounding surprised. “Solas, what did you do?”

“I did nothing,” he said. “I always smell this good, vhenan. Don’t act so shocked.”

She shoved him a little after that, and when she pulled away he caught a glimpse of the teeth inside her pink mouth, and he wanted to kiss them. All of them.

Leliana approached, placed her hand on Sene’s shoulder. “Are you both ready?” she said, smiling. Sene looked at Solas. “Are we ready?” she said.

He studied her. The freckles, the dusting of the pale vallaslin across her cheeks. He moved a single strand of hair off her face and behind her ear. “Yes, I believe we are,” he said.

 

They shared a carriage with Leliana and Cullen, who had appeared at the very last moment. A message had arrived from Skyhold. Morrigan was experiencing a slight delay

“What now?” said Sene. “Is everything all right?”

"Yes,” said Cullen, adjusting his sash. He looked less grizzled than usual. Trim, put together. He’d had a haircut and a shave. “Though apparently there’s been a development.”

Sene sighed. “All these developments,” she said, putting her face into her hands. “They’re starting to hurt my head.”

“Sene,” said Solas, placing a firm but comforting hand on the back of her neck. “I know you're tired, but let the Commander finish. Perhaps this is a positive development?"

“Indeed,” said Cullen “For once, that is the case. The location of the Shrine seems to have... changed? That’s all I could get from her note. Terribly confusing to be honest. In any case, she’s working on it.”

“What does that mean for us?” said Sene, looking up at Cullen through her hands, then to Solas, strangely unwilling to entertain any modicum of hope. At this point, it had so often eluded her. She was not sure she wanted to know the truth.

“It means,” said Leliana, “that as long as Corypheus remains in hiding, this only buys us more time.”

“More time?” said Sene, dropping her hands into her lap. “Yes, Inquisitor,” said Cullen. “More time.”

“See, vhenan?” said Solas, smirking, applying a small bit pressure to the back of her neck. “Patience.”

She felt him touch his nose to her hair, only just. “Very well,” she said.

“Solas,” said Leliana, "while I have you here, I might as well let you know."

“Go on,” he said.

“We've experienced great success influencing your reputation from behind closed doors these past couple of days. The whispers are positively flying.”

“And?”  
“And this means that my job is done. The fate of the evening now lies in your hands.” “That is to be expected,” he said. “Is it not?”

“Still,” said Leliana, low and cool, her eyes lined, dark beneath red lashes. “It may interest you to know that the rumors have resonated...differently with the Orlesian women than with the men. The women have romanticized you deeply.”

Sene glanced up at him, amused, but the the muscles were fluttering in his jaw, and he did not glance back. His gaze taut, steel, he seemed intrigued but entirely unsurprised.

“And the men,” he said. “I suppose they’re, what? Curious?”

“They certainly are,” she said. “It is far better than hostile, I assure you. You’ve got their attention.”

“Thank you, Leliana.”

“If I may offer one suggestion?” she said.

“Certainly.”

“Perhaps you could give them something to sate their curiosity. Something they have not seen before?”

“Such as?”

“I’ll let you decide, specifically,” she said. “I trust your instincts, Solas. In any case, we should be arriving soon. The two of you should hold onto your hats. There is no telling what the night has in store.”

“First,” said Cullen, reaching into his jacket pocket. “Take these. Both of you.”

He handed each of them a little brass pin. Eye and sword.

“Wear them,” he said. “Though you are not on diplomatic duty tonight, the party would do well to remember your mantle. You are the Inquisition, after all.”

Sene studied the small pin, smiled. She fit it to Solas’s lapel. Then he helped her as well, only to do it, he had to slide half of his hand beneath the fabric of her dress. The touch was high and fleeting, but it staggered her. She leaned into him, helpless to the impulse, put her hand into his, her head on his shoulder, breathed.

“This is very thoughtful, Commander,” said Solas, his voice kind and attentive. “Well, I—I thought it only right,” said Cullen, smiling, looking away.

 

The Berrande estate outside of Val Royeaux was grandly peculiar, an artistic affair, and deeply unexpected: a great, biting chilly creature of spires, trellis, fountain, and iron. The red rooftops, the hedges in shapes of lions and apes. It was dark now, the moon a full, white paw, and there were all of these green fireflies, buzzing, brought out by the moisture and dance from the rain. Sene was smitten by the fireflies. She watched them blink, and they reminded her of childhood, and of Solas’s magic. He took her hand as they went up the walkway, loosely, his practiced touch.

Once they finally got inside, the party was fast and bright. A band of many brass instruments, loud, people everywhere, dressed big like animals—all feathers and furs and scales it seemed. The whole place smelled like booze, flowers, intrigue. A proud usher closed the door behind them, and they were promptly greeted by a tiny woman in a purple crinoline, a great many green feathers, and a gold, Orlesian mask. Behind her slogged a man—tall, but not as tall as Solas. He was big, though, and he wore mask as well, and he had his hands clasped tightly behind his back. These were, Sene could only assume, the Comtesse and Comte Berrande.

“My Lady Inquisitor,” said the Comtesse, striking a deep curtsy for Sene.

Feeling awkward, Sene returned the gesture. She heard Sera stifling a laugh from behind them. “Comtesse Letitia Berrande, I assume."

“Yes. It is so wonderful to have you here with us tonight. This is my husband, Comte Michel Berrande. He is charmed as well.”

He bowed, unenthused. “A pleasure, my lady.” He lingered then. “Would you please, introduce us to your escort for the evening?”

Solas bowed, curt, but gracious. “You may call me Solas, your lordship,” he said. “I am pleased to be here. This estate is a monumental feat of Orlesian architecture. I do not believe I’ve ever seen more impressive hedge work.”

“Why, thank you,” said the Comte, surprised.

“Ser Solas,” said the Comtesse. She held out her hand. He kissed it, kindly, in greeting. “We have heard so much about you these past few days. Your grand marches on the battlefield of the Arbor Wilds, dragon hunting in the fields of southern Ferelden. I hope you’ll grace us with more of your stories as the night draws forth.”

“It is my pleasure,” he said. “Or, I should say, our pleasure. Both Isene and I have a great many stories from our time in the Inquisition. We are happy to share.” He held her hand a bit tighter, a gesture of reassurance.

“Isene?” said the Comte then, brisk.  
“Isene is my first name, your lordship,” said Sene.

“Isene,” said the Comtesse. “Such a beautiful name. I knew this about you. Saw it in a letter from Lady Montilyet. Lovely woman.”

“And what does it mean?” blurted the Comte, perhaps more aggressively than intended.

“What does what mean, your lordship?” said Solas.

“Isene. I have not heard this name before. What does it mean?”

Sene paused. The question was odd. It seemed to be directed slightly...downward. It had been a blighted curiosity, probably unwitting, but still. A dig. She could sense Solas, bristling.

"Oh, Michel," said the Comtesse.  
"I am merely curious," said the Comte.

"It is Elvhen," said Solas. Then, he tilted past Sene and slightly toward the Comte, asserting his height. "I'm sure you've heard of the language, your lordship. Spoken mostly among your servants, I assume."

"Perhaps—"

"I could personally teach you all about it, if you like," said Solas. "That would be unnecessary," said the Comte.

"Very well," said Solas. "Then I'll keep it simple."

"Simple?"

"Yes," he said. "You asked for the meaning of the Inquisitor's name. I intend to tell you. Her name, Isene, means to be like fire.”

"Like fire?" said The Comtesse. "Really?"

Solas nodded, very still, holding the Comte’s gaze, letting the moment burn off real slow between them. Sene had no idea what to expect. Then, Solas casually snapped his gloved fingers, once, opened his palm, and from thin air appeared a small lip of flame. It flitted, a butterfly, from his hand into the air above Sene’s head, and disappeared into a pinch of smoke in her hair. The spell was fast, but it was bright and hot. The Comtesse gasped, then clapped with enthusiasm. Solas smiled, straightening his tie.

“Such wonders!” said the Comtesse. “You will have to show us more, Ser Solas.”

 He was still holding Sene’s hand, never once let up on his grip. “Of course,” he said. “Later, perhaps.”

The Comte eventually shifted where he stood, embarrassed. “I have heard the Elvhen language,” he said. “I meant no insult, Ser Solas.”

Solas smirked. “None taken, your lordship.”

The Comtesse huffed at the Comte, dismissive, and then she cupped a gloved hand to Sene’s elbow and took her aside. She leaned forward, to whisper, woman to woman: “He is terribly close-minded, my lady,” she said, “but I assure you. He does not—what is the expression?—wear the pants in this marriage. Do you see?” She smiled, winked from inside her mask.

“I’m sure I do now,” said Sene. “Thank you, your ladyship.” “Your warrior is very charming,” she said. “No?”  
Sene blushed.

“Ah well,” said the Comtesse. She straightened up, deeply charmed, turning back to the men. “We are so delighted to have you both here with us tonight, in addition to your entourage. You must know by now that I hold your Inquisition in my deepest admiration. I have heard only the grandest tales of Skyhold. I hope to one day set foot inside the fortress myself.”

“The tales do not lie, your ladyship,” said Solas. “I assure you, Skyhold is every bit as grand as you’ve been told.”

“Oh, how I believe you.” The Comtesse demured, whipped out a gold paper fan. “Ser Solas, Lady Inquisitor. Please, follow me. Both of you. The party has only just begun.”

 

“So. Fire butterflies in the middle of tense conversation,” said Sene. “Bold.”

“I was merely sating the man's curiosity,” said Solas. Some time had passed. Now, they danced, slow, pressed together amidst a myriad of other couples. The band had calmed to a ballad. There must have been about one hundred people at the party, all crowded there in the ballroom. The ceiling was so magnificent, it almost rivaled that of the ballroom in the Winter Palace. She did not understand how this kind of wealth could come to be, but she was too optimistic that night to let the thought poison her. She focused on Solas instead, how he smelled and looked, and how he was so sure of himself. She had not seen him this confident in a while.

“So, this thing with Morrigan,” said Sene.

Solas touched his cheek to her ear, flushed. “Hmm?”

“What do you think it means that the location has changed?” “I don’t think the location has changed at all,” he said.

“Tell me,” she said. “Come on, I want to understand.”

He sighed. “This probably just means, vhenan, that the knowledge derived from the Well is more chimeric than Morrigan initially understood. Perhaps the location of the Shrine has merely changed shape in her mind.”

“That makes sense,” she said. “I suppose.”

“I know you are curious,” he said. “But more on this later. Let us forget the Inquisition. For tonight.”

“Sorry," she said.

“Don’t be sorry, vhenan.” He slid his guiding hand up her back then, finding the skin of her neck, slowed their dance to a crawl. He was staring at her, hard.

"What?" she said.

"I'd like to kiss you," he said.

“Okay," she said, smiling. “Don’t you remember Cole on the battlements? She always wants you to kiss her. He wasn’t lying. Just kiss me. Or, I can kiss you, if you like.”

Solas grinned. “No, I don’t think you understand, avise’ain." "I don't?"

"The way you look," he said, "the way you are tonight, if I were to kiss you, I’d have to consume you. The whole thing. Dress to insides. Your hair, these flowers. None of it would survive. We would cause a sensation. The night would be over. The battle lost.”

The music changed. That was the end of their dance. A servant appeared at their side then with many tall flutes of champagne on a bronze platter. Solas took two, nodded graciously, and the servant moved on. He handed one glass to Sene, drank from his, very coy.

Sene, meanwhile, had grown hazy. She was melting—her mind, her heart, everything. She was all but a puddle on the floor. “Solas,” she said, holding her glass.

“Yes, vhenan?”

“You have to stop doing that.”

“Doing what, vhenan?”

She stood on her tip-toes, dragged him down by the ear, lowered her voice. “Talking like that. You know what it does.”

“Yes,” he said. “I do.”

She took a long drink of champagne. The bubbles hit her in a good way, making her dizzy, making her smile. “Just be careful,” she said. “I’m not as...smooth as you are. Whatever I’m feeling, it tends to spill out all over the floor without my permission.”

“I know this,” he said. “I’m sorry to tease. It’s just that I can’t help it tonight.” “It's okay,” she said.

He grinned, tugged her on the ears, leaned in, and kissed her once on the mouth, let his lips graze and trail away. No tongue, just soft, wet, shallow. Still, it put her in a fog. He looked her in the eye. “Stay with me, vhenan.” She smiled at him, dreamy.

“I do hope I’m not interrupting,” came a voice. They both looked, kicked back into existence. Standing before them was a tall, silver woman. She was younger than the Comtesse, and she looked just like a cat. “The two of you,” she said. “The Comtesse has been talking my ear off about you all evening. I have wanted to meet you myself. I am Madame Lucille Petit.”

She held out her hand for Solas to take. He did, nodding. “Charmed, Madame Petit. I am Solas, and this is Lady Inquisitor Isene Lavellan.”

“My lady,” said the Madame, curtsying.

“Madame,” said Sene, unable to bring herself to another curtsy, nodding graciously instead.

“I was wondering if I might borrow Ser Solas for a moment,” said the Madame to Sene. “With your permission, of course, my lady. But there are several of us at the bar who wish to see your warrior’s magic.” She looked up at Solas then, smitten. “We heard of your butterfly in the vestibule. So whimsical. So pure.”

“Pure, huh?” said Sene.

“I’m not sure,” said Solas, glancing to Sene. “We’ve only just gotten to the ballroom.”

“It’s quite all right,” said Sene. “You go. I have to find a mirror anyway.”

“A mirror?” he said.

“Yes, a mirror.” She turned to Madame Petit. “With all the rain you’ve been having in Val Royeaux, I’m afraid my hair has taken on a mind of its own.”

“Oh, the Inquisitor’s hair,” said the Madame. “A marvelous creature, admired my many. Like fire on the Waking Sea at sunset.”

Solas raised his eyebrows. “Really?” he said.  
“I’ll find you when I’m finished,” said Sene, wishing to avoid more conversation on the topic of

her hair. “Go on. Nothing too bold, vhenan.”  
He was a little unsure then as the Madame hooked her arm into his. “We will be at the bar,” she

said. “And I will return your warrior to you in one piece, my lady,” she said. “I promise.” Sene shrugged her shoulders. Solas smiled, resigned, his jaw firm, and he looked back as the

Madame dragged him away through the crowd. He mouthed the words, “Ara vhen’an.” Sene waved at him.

Once he was gone, the first thing she did was go looking for Sera. She found Josephine first, laughing with her hand on the arm of the Comte at the edge of the dance floor. Leliana stood by, surveying the affair, absorbing, seeing all, gloved hands clasped in front of her. Surveying the affair, absorbing, seeing all, gloved hands clasped in front of her. She nodded briskly at Sene when she saw her, then nodded firmly toward the window to their left. There, she saw several tall, round tables scattered. Standing around one of them were Sera, Cullen, and Cassandra. They seemed to be huddled around an open book. Sene approached.

“What’s going with the three of you?” she said, sipping her champagne. Her glass was almost empty.

Cassandra shot her head up when she heard her, embarrassed. She looked around. “Where is Solas?”

“A tall gray cat woman stole him away from me and took him to the bar so that he could show her and her friends magical butterflies.”

Sera laughed. “Poor elven man,” she said.  
“You both seem to be doing just fine,” said Cullen. “Anything interesting to report?”

“Not really,” said Sene. “The champagne is very good, and Solas has already intimidated the Comte.”

“Good on him,” said Sera. “What did he do? Get all tall and elfy and thwoar? He’s right good at that.”

“That’s pretty much exactly what he did,” said Sene. “So what are you all reading?” “It’s Cassandra’s,” said Sera, giggling. “Dirty, dirty Cassandra’s.”

Cassandra sighed, hopeless. “It’s the latest chapter of Swords and Shields. Sera insisted on reading it along with me.”

“And you, Commander?” said Sene.  
“I was just standing here,” he said. “They came to me.”

“You’ve got your pants on too tight, Commander,” said Sera. “We’re only trying to loosen them up a bit.”

Cullen blushed, looked at the floor. He clasped his hands together in front of him on the table. “Yes, well,” he said, glancing at Sene. In these bashful, guarded moments, she related to him most.

“Go easy on him,” said Sene.

“I have done nothing,” said Cassandra.

“Nothing but bring the smut to the party,” said Sera. “Look at this bit here, she reached for his long, hard, thrumming—thrumming?” Then she looked up at Sene, in earnest, her eyes these big, wishing coins. “Does it really thrum?” she said. “Like a guitar or something?”

Cullen sighed and put his head in his hands. Cassandra snatched the book away and slammed it shut. “I think that’s enough thrumming for one evening,” she said.

“Suit yourself,” said Sera.

“Anyway,” said Sene. “I just came by to say hello. I’m going to the powder room now. To powder my...well, I don’t actually have any powder, so to speak. But still. Anyone care to join me?”

“You go,” said Cassandra. “We’ll be here. Further enduring the agony.”

“Quiz,” said Sera. “You’d tell me if it thrums, right? Like, really thrums?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’d tell you if it thrums.”

 

In the powder room itself, the space was warm and very stuffy. It felt like plucking through the feathers of a great, blue bird. Everything was puffed up. There were deep couches and huge mirrors draped in periwinkle silks and low-hanging chandeliers adorned with lions, their mouths open, snarling. Sene thought it was pretty weird. Solas, as usual, was somehow wise to everything. He always knew how to act, but even after the Winter Palace, Sene was not used to such...displays, and she wanted to feel more graceful, but the truth was, that night, she just felt very tall. Even as an elf, and elves were not typically very tall—aside from Solas, and Sera, who were both taller than her and tall for elves and, incidentally, the only elves she spent any real time with—she still seemed to be towering over every single Orlesian women at the party, and even several of the men. How?

She took a moment, fanned herself with a green paper fan supplied by Josephine. It had adornments of red and silver specifically to match her hair, and Solas, and her dress, which had pockets, and she liked this touch. There were several other women ducking in and out of the room, spreading out in front of the mirrors, popping their mouths wide open, full of lipstick and knowing smiles. They all knew Sene, of course, all acknowledged her, reverent, and knowing. My lady. She was quite used to it by now, and some of them she even remembered from the ball at the Winter Palace. Unlike at the Winter Palace, however, Sene was surprised to see that they did not all wear masks here. Though most of them did go to great pains to obscure their faces in some way—either with ruffles or wide, funny hats. Plumage, as Solas would have called it.

She found a mirror then, a great, shiny oval mounted to the wall, and started fussing with her hair. Even with all the pins, still, it was growing. She could almost feel it lifting right off her scalp. The white flowers were an odd and singular touch. She liked them, but they were all starting to come loose as well. Still, at some point, she realized she was alone, and she had adjusted her hair so many times that it became clear she needed to leave. Obsession was Solas’s thing. It made her itch, and she thought it was probably time she go find him. But three women came in wearing huge crinolines then and all crowded in front of a single standing mirror by the door. Feeling awkward, and wanting to avoid the needless curtsies and small talk, Sene hid herself in the corner of the massive, blue couch at the back of the room, holding the fan to her face, waiting. It seemed that the three of them were engaged in small talk of their own.

“It is him, no?” said the first in her Orlesian accent, withdrawing a brass mirror from her gilded clutch. “The lover?”

“It must be,” said the second.

“I saw him standing at the bar with Madame Lucille earlier,” said the first. “Making butterflies with his hands. Have you ever seen a man perform such clever, small magics? And with such sensitivity. Almost too much to take.”

“And how he stands with such patience,” said the third, a dab of mascara, a bit of blush. “Such a disciplined man. I wish my Ralph would stand like that.”

“Disciplined?” said the second. “An apostate?”

The first woman clicked her tongue. “Madame. This word is passe. He is a great warrior. You’ve heard the stories.”

“I only wish I knew what it was like,” said the first, and she giggled. “For the Herald of Andraste. I’m sure she is very pleased with herself. Her warrior must be disciplined in more ways than one.”

“Shh!” said the third. “She will hear you!” “Hmm?”

“She is sitting right over there.”

All three of them glanced back to the couch then. Sene looked around, awkwardly, her face very warm. She stood, unsure of what else to do but confront the moment head-on. So she smiled, walked past them, grabbed the great, brass handle of the door. “Good evening, madames,” she said. “Having fun?”

“I should say so,” said the first woman, grinning. “Ser Solas is waiting right outside, my lady. He only just arrived, right before we did.”

“Oh,” she said, surprised, smoothing a hand over her dress. “Well, that is good to know.”

“You should go to him,” said the third woman, winking from somewhere deep inside her great neck piece of soft, white feathers, like icing. "Try and test his discipline. Let us know how it goes.” They all laughed at this, a chorus of high-pitched bird calls.

Sene raised her eyebrows. “I’m not entirely sure that’s wise,” she said, surprising herself. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to say that out loud.”

“Farewell, my lady,” one of them said. They all waved her off with their fans. She shook her head, laughing, and went into the hall.

And there, she saw him. He stood, just as those three bright birds had promised, leaning with his back against a wooden door, nonchalant, tall, disciplined, hands clasped loosely in front of him. He smiled when he saw her there, eyebrows raised. “There you are,” he said, knowing, unmatched, “Inquisitor."


	23. Man of Faith, Pt. 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The evening soldiers on, then comes to a most unexpected close.

“You got away,” said Sene.

“Yes, well. There are only so many kinds of magic, vhenan. I had to leave before I wore out all my mystique.”

“And we certainly wouldn’t want that,” she said.

“No, we certainly wouldn't,” he said. You could hear the party then, muffled and purple, still sparkling but far away, and they were alone in the long, silver hallway for the time being. To her surprise, he leaned past her. Looked left, right, and then he backed into the door until it opened behind him. Inside, she saw a small but grandly decorated room. An office of some sort. The walls were lined from floor to ceiling with leatherback books. A heavy, polished desk, a great arm chair of green. “A moment,” he said.

She looked at him, knowing. She reached up to straighten his tie. “Have you always been this tall?” she said.

He raised his eyebrows, guiding her into the room with a hand on her waist. "Yes," he said, shutting the door silently behind them.

“So,” said Sene, excited. Finally. “How many butterflies did you have to conjure before they let you leave?” She surveyed the desk. She pushed a few books aside, gently, hopped up, sat on the edge with her legs dangling off the floor.

“Twelve,” said Solas, standing very straight with his hands in his pockets. Unlike her, he had not moved. “Six of them are still flitting. I left them as part of the décor.”

“Do any of the women here strike your fancy?” she said.

He studied her. He had not been expecting this, she could tell.

“You mean besides you?” he said.

She arched her back a little, feeling hot, red, flushed as she watched him. “Yes, besides me. There are a great many birds here for you to choose from.”

He seemed very serious all of a sudden, still with his hands in his pockets. Still, wise, eyes hardening around hers as granite. She stared back, intent, but she softened, too. She couldn’t help that part. In the way of focus, he had her beat. Always. “No,” he said.

“No?” she said.

“You are the only bird that I want, Isene.”

She exhaled. It was blunt, and it made her come apart a little bit, lose her grasp. Something about him, it had changed. Solidified. His shivering, his insecurity, everything she’d carried him through over the past few weeks, it seemed healed, as his hand. It had her intensely curious. “Come here,” she said.

“I will,” he said, watching her, doing that thing he always used to. Memorizing her lines, her angles, her scent. Making her wait.

Sene’s impatience could make her do impulsive things, but this time, she wanted to let it ride out. She sensed a sort of slow burn between them. Solas’s restraint, heightened. This was something she wanted to explore. So she leaned back on her palms in invitation. She opened her legs inside the dress, one at a time, a rustling noise. Once she did this, he reached back with one hand, turned the lock on the door. It made a loud, metal click.

She smiled, waiting. He took a few steps toward her, then one more, and at last, he was between her knees. He then took his other hand out of his pocket.

“ _Ame nar asha rad,_ ” she said as he removed his gloves, dropped them to the floor at his feet. “What will you do with me?”

This, after all, brought a smile. Playing right at the corners of his mouth. It weakened him. Another dance. He sighed, and in his exhaling, she could hear him finally give in to the heat between them. Warm, unlocking his focus, only just, letting his gaze fall down from her eyes to her lips, to the deep V of her green dress. He seemed intensely kept, curious and eager as he brought his bare hands to her knees where they hid there, pushed up the skirt, slowly, so that she could feel the three layers of tulle, scratching. Once he saw skin, he paused to stare, and then he put his hand up her dress to undo the hooks of her underclothes—something he was not used to, and yet, he seemed well-versed enough, and he pushed them away, and with the tulle from the dress crowding between them, he studied her and touched her, and then she let her head fall back as he put two fingers inside her, drew out the wet slowly, spreading her wide open.

He dropped to his knees, and she felt him then, though she could not see him, as he nudged her all the way to the edge of the desk, spread her legs wide, and held her there. Then, she felt his mouth in worship. She let loose, a shudder. She was such an easy catch anymore. Maybe he’d gotten too good, knew her tells and her particular science too well. But it didn’t matter, as this was Solas, and this is what he did. He knew things, took her there, so worldly. She held the back of his neck with one hand, gripped the desk with the other. Everything—it came quickly. She lost it, hard, in what seemed like no time at all, and the desk shook. It was loud. She tried not to be, pressing her wrist to her open mouth, bit down on the sleeve. She could feel him reacting, too, his fingers hooked inside her now as she went, dragging her all the way to the ragged edge.

Exhausted, she lie there, half draped to the desk. He stood. He took her hands and gently pulled her upright until he had her eyes again. Smiling, he said, “Finished?”

She nodded, groggy with lust and love, and she put her hands around his neck, wrapped her legs around him, and he picked her up, tulle and all, and then took them both to the wide, green chair where she straddled him, and without any delay, she picked up her dress, found his belt, undid him slowly. She felt him watching her hands, waiting, patient, his own hands light on her waist as she rose. She took him into her hand, and she placed him inside her, and when she lowered all the way, settled there on his hips, she watched as he closed his eyes, tilted back his head, exhaled, crumbling. She had to compose herself as well. Her insides, still hot from his tongue, exposed, as lightning, but then she spread out the dress so that they swam in a sea of green, and she brought the waves to him, slow but full, and as she pulsed, after a little while, she could feel his hands, their familiar, unthinking crawl from her waist, up her back, until they found her hair.

She reached back and took them down gently. He opened his eyes, so gray, watched her and realized. “I’m sorry,” he said.

She just shook her head, deeply possessed, pressed their hands together as she continued. But he broke free and took hold of her, held her close. He put his mouth to her ear. “ _Avise’ain,_ ” he said, half-smiling. She could hear it in his voice as she gripped to the back of the chair behind him. “This will not take long.”

“I know,” she said.

And as soon as she spoke, it seemed, he rose, clamping down on her hips, driving upward, into her, meeting her waves with his own, head back, eyes closed, voice breaking as he emptied inside her. His high, pale whimpers bottoming out to deep, gravel gasps, and then she felt his whole body tremble, and she slowed down, and once he finished, finally, she drew still. Waited. Everything softened. She dropped her head to his chest, breathed deep, listening to the sound of his heartbeat as it slowed. “ _Emma,_ ” she said, hugging him, smiling.

And surfacing, he rubbed the full length her back with his open, bare palms. He kissed her hair, softly. “ _Emma,_ ” he said.

           

When they got back to the ballroom, the noise had died down. The band still played, but they could sense that dinner was drawing near. Sene, still just a puddle on the floor, was sweet-smelling, hot, undone. But she was satisfied and dreamy, and she held his hand as they walked. He lead her to a pillar by the side the dance floor so that he could lean, and so that she could lean against him.

But for Sene, the more time that passed, the clearer it became that, despite everything, her hair, in all of its ripe, red glory, had finally betrayed her.

“Shit,” she said, beginning to fuss with the pins.

“What’s wrong, vhenan?” said Solas.

“My hair,” she said.

He sighed. “You and your hair must figure out some sort of truce. I cannot continuously play intermediary between you.”

“It’s a tragedy,” she said.

“You’re being dramatic.”

But she wasn’t. The heat of the ballroom and the humidity of their sex were both working together to make her curls grow feral. “Just look at this,” she said, her hands pressing to her forehead, then sweeping through the up-do as it fell. “Solas, my hair is turning into a rodent refuge.”

He straightened up then, taking note. She was serious. He turned her around so that he could survey the damage. “Hold on,” he said.

“Solas.”

“I see what’s happening,” he said. “And I believe there is only one course of action.”

She felt his hands then, both of them, working their way from the back of her skull, all the way to her temples. It was unexpected and terribly relaxing. “What are you doing?” she said. She felt the pins then, dropping, and her hair getting big, heavy, loose. There it was. It all fell, all of it. Around her shoulders. The up-do was gone to the dogs. Solas had taken the whole thing down, and he was pulling his fingers through it piece by piece, smoothing the curls as best he could. Then, he twisted the great, red mop once and set it over her shoulder. He turned her around once more, took her face into his hands. “There,” he said, smiling. “It’s fixed.”

“You took the whole thing down?” she said. She brought her hands to the top of her head, but he grabbed her by the wrists and set them gently down by her sides.

“Leave it, vhenan,” he said. “This is how it has to be. You look beautiful, and remember Madame Petit—what did she call it? _A fire on the Waking Sea at sunset._ ” He smirked.

“This is not a joke!” she said, shoving him a little, but then she caved quickly and hid her face in his chest. “It’s just so big,” she said.

“It is yours,” he said, kissing the top of her head. How he loved it, all of it, her hair.

In that moment then, there were bells. Great, mounting carillon that sailed over and past them, a song of romance and the sea. Sene cheered up, right away, on fire, smiling big. “Like Crestwood,” she said. “Only working.”

“Like Crestwood,” he said, putting her hair behind her ears. It was quite unruly, and he could already see the sweat beading at her forehead. He took a pin from his pocket then, just to tuck a bit of it off her face. “It’s warm in here,” he said when she questioned him with her eyes. “I want you to be comfortable, vhenan.”

“Okay _,_ ” she said, grabbing his cheeks, kissing him once. “What are the bells for?”

“Dinner, of course,” he said.

“Where’s dinner?”

“I’m not sure,” said Solas. “The dining room?”

Just then, an elven servant happened by, carrying more flutes of champagne, but he was in a hurry. Solas tapped him on the arm, hailed him back, “ _Savhalla, lathal’lin. Lanem?_ ”

“ _Vin._ Of course.” He held out the platter. They each took one.

They looked around as the room began to empty. Solas drained half his glass in a single swig. Sene was slightly less aggressive as she drank, but only just. Then—

“Ah! There you are.” It was Josephine. She looked lovely and flushed but also in a great hurry. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you two.”

“That’s odd,” said Solas. “We’ve not left the ballroom once.”

“I find that hard to believe, Solas,” she said. “Anyway, I am here to—” She looked up, noticed Sene’s hair. “Inquisitor,” she said.

“What?” Sene brought her hands to her head. “Oh.”

“There were…complications,” said Solas. “Let me explain.”

“Please,” said Josephine, blushing, a half-smile. “There’s no need for explanation. I just—you look ravaging, Inquisitor. Perhaps we should have just kept it down to begin with.”

“I told you,” said Solas. “Now, Josephine. What can we do for you?”

“Well, I’m here to escort you.”

“Escort us where?” said Sene.

“To dinner of course.”

“Can’t we just follow the masses?”

“Inquisitor, you and Solas are tonight’s honored guests. You’ll be dining with the Comte and Comtesse personally, in a private dining room upstairs.”

“Just us and them?” said Sene.

“Well, yes.”

“Splendid,” said Solas, polishing off his champagne.

Sene followed suit.

“Pace yourself, Isene,” said Solas.

“I’m fine. In fact, I’d like another glass.”

“There will be plenty of wine with dinner,” said Josephine.

“Can’t I have more now?” said Sene. “I _am_ the Inquisitor, after all.”

She was mostly joking, but Josephine did not joke. She sighed, looking around the room. When she spotted a servant with an open bottle of champagne, she snapped her fingers, whistled high and bright, and the man came rushing toward them.

“What a wonderful trick,” said Solas.

Josephine fussed with her sash, straightened her jacket. “Well,” she said, “I thank you, Solas. It took me years as a bard to learn to whistle like that. Now, here comes your champagne, Inquisitor. And as soon as it gets here, let us proceed to the grand stairwell. The Comte and Comtesse await you both. Eagerly.”

 

Dinner became a surprisingly smooth and painless affair. The Comtesse, it turned out, was very interested in Sene’s backstory as a Dalish elf, her upbringing, and, oddly enough, the geography of the Free Marches, one of the few places she’d never been. She was a wise, diligent woman with impeccable manners and a gracious heart, genuinely interested in all that Sene had to say. It was almost endearing. And while it was at least in part because Sene had had a great deal of wine, she somehow found herself very eager to share, feeling grateful and open, sure of herself. No longer anxious, she felt strong, worthy of her mantle. For once.

Other than to compliment the Comtesse on her choice of entrees, or to aid Sene in her storytelling, Solas spoke very little during the actual meal. He was appreciative and intelligent, and he used every opportunity to whisk Sene’s hair off her shoulders, nod on her behalf, take her hand into his, and kiss it. They were earnest gestures. He was both comfortable and deeply aware by her side. After the butterfly incident in the vestibule, she’d been a bit concerned about the prospect of dining face to face with the Comte, but not Solas. Perhaps it helped that the Comte spoke very little as well, leaving the banter to the women, feeding himself meticulously with a fork and knife, and drinking his wine from a great, pewter goblet as big as a gourd. He and Solas regarded each other with a modicum of respect; however, it was clear that, whatever tension had been initiated back in the vestibule, it still lingered between them. Just as Leliana had told them both in the carriage, his interest was not hostile, merely _curious._ He wanted to understand Solas, so that he did not have to fear him. Still, his air of superiority in the honored presence of two elves, one Dalish and one mysterious apostate who’d hijacked the entire evening’s affair with his _charm_ and _wit,_ could not be stifled. Both Sene and Solas read this with ease, though again, it was easy to ignore as long as the Comte kept his mouth shut.

At some point, however, as dinner drew to a close, the plates cleared, tea poured, the Comtesse pulled a compact mirror from her clutch to freshen her lipstick. It was during the silence that the Comte let his curiosity get the best of him. Again.

“So,” he wagered from the head of the table. “Er…Ser Solas.”

Solas turned over his attention, promptly. “Yes, your lordship?”   

“Despite your _…status…_ as an apostate,” said the Comte, clearing his throat, unwilling to make eye contact, stirring a single cube of sugar into his tea, “we hear you’re quite the scholar. Now, we have seen small wonders tonight, mostly in the form of insects. But now that we are here, just the four of us, and dinner is through, won’t you, please, tell us about your…real magic. Your specialties. Anything interesting?”

“Well, that depends,” said Solas, bringing the glass of wine to his lips, sipping, setting it on the table once more.

This finally drew the Comte’s eyes. “Depends on what?”

“On how you define interesting.”

“Solas is a rift mage,” said Sene. “Do you know what that is, your lordship?”

“I’m sure I do not, my lady.”

“It means he manipulates the Veil,” she said, making the shape of a great big circle with her hands, exaggerating, entirely for effect. “At times, he’ll even extract matter from the Fade itself in order to achieve his magical goals.”

The Comte brought a napkin to his mouth, then folded it back to the table. He looked concerned. “What kind of…matter?”

“Well—”

“Thank you, Isene,” said Solas, molding his hand to hers, kissing it, then holding it earnestly on the table between them, “but I believe I can take it from here.”

“Of course.”

He turned back to the Comte. “Have you ever seen a boulder in the shape of a massive fist?” he said, making a fist with his other hand, holding it out between them.

"No,” said the Comte, studying the fist, unsure, but still curious.

“Well, I can pull that out of the Fade,” said Solas.

“Really?”

“Really.” He loosened the fist, finished his wine. “Of course, not all my magic is quite so…flashy.”

“Hmm,” said the Comte, drinking the last of his tea, ringing the bell for the serving girl to bring more.

“Well, I think it sounds wonderfully complex,” said the Comtesse, sipping her wine. “Please, tell us more, Ser Solas.”

“Lutetia,” said the Comte. “Contain yourself. Please.”

“Ah, it is no bother,” said Solas, leaning back in his chair. “Your curiosity becomes you, your ladyship.”

With this, Sene had to clamp her mouth shut to keep from laughing. Solas gave her hand a slight squeeze. The Comtesse, meanwhile, was, yet again, deeply charmed beneath that gold Orlesian mask of hers and took to fanning herself with a blue paper fan.

The serving girl appeared then. She, however, skipped right over the Comte. “Tea, Ser Solas?” she said, eyebrows raised, holding a tea kettle in a mittened hand. She was a young, bright elf, about Sene’s age, with yellow hair secured into a neat bun at the back of her head.

“Oh, I appreciate the offer, _lethal’lan_ ,” said Solas, cool and smoky, smirking at the Comte. “But I despise the stuff.” He turned to Sene. “Isene?”

“We would love some more wine, _lethal’lan_ ,” she said, gracious, “if it isn’t a bother.”

“ _Sathem,_ Your Worship. No bother. I shall return.” She bowed for Sene, smiled at Solas, then she promptly left the room.

“She might have at least left the kettle,” grumbled the Comte, arms crossed over his barrel chest.

“Oh, _Michel_ ,” said the Comtesse, still fanning herself with that blue paper fan. “Please. Quit whining. And for the love of Andraste, sit up straight, won’t you? We have _guests_.”

As they continued their bickering, Sene leaned into Solas. Smiling, she whispered into his ear, “No butterflies this time, huh, _Ser Solas_?”

He brought her hand to his lips one more time, kissing it, lazily. To her, he seemed tired. “No, _avise’ain,_ " he said. "No more butterflies. I believe my work here is done.”

 

They were on their way back into the city inside the hour. The wine had hit them hard, and in the carriage, alone, they were both sleepy and woozy with booze and glitter, especially Solas. He had outdone himself, and, to Sene, it was terribly endearing. His head was in her lap, his eyes these soft, little gray lights, heavily lidded. His collar loosened, tie in his pocket, forehead damp.

“Are the others behind us or ahead of us?” said Solas.

“Behind,” said Sene.

He nuzzled into her now, his arms wrapped around her waist. “I have not had that much to drink in a very long time."

“I’ve never had that much to drink,” she said, laughing. “You’ll be okay.”

“Sene,” he said, his voice muffled into the fabric of her dress.

“Hmm?”

“I need to ask you something.”

“You can ask me anything.”

“I don't want to confuse you," he said. "This whole evening was strange and weird. Butterflies. And yet, things are...clearer, somehow."

"I can tell," she said.

"What would it take, vhenan?” he said.

“What would _what_ take?”

He turned onto his back so that she could see his face, reached up to put his hands in her hair. “Great big nest,” he said, smiling.

“I love you,” she said.

“Tell me the truth.”

“The truth about what? You’re being incredibly vague.”

“About what it would take for you to decide I am not the man you thought I was," he said. "That I am…a different man. A man you could not love?”

“What?” she said.

He was pulling her hair apart now at the ends, piece by piece, eyes closed. “I am so afraid of losing you.”

“Solas,” she said, “sit up.”

He was heavy, warm. Still, she was strong and able to haul him up and off of her and into a sit. She found his eyes, but he did not last long. He flung his arm around her shoulders and tipped over until his face was deep in her hair. “I am sorry,” he said, breathing deep. “Tonight—you’re so beautiful, Sene. Like an apple, or a tree. I do not understand.”

“You don’t understand what, Solas?”

“This path we made. It took me by surprise.”

She put her hand on his cheek. It seemed that the events of the evening had worn out his guard entirely, sapped him. Her charming warrior. He did not seem so tough now. "I know," she said. "I know everything."

"No," he said. "You don't."

She shook her head. “I know you,” she said, "and that's what matters. I'm not going anywhere, okay? You and me, okay?” She smiled, leaned forward to kiss the long bridge of his nose.

“Okay,” he said, dreamy. But then the carriage hit a bump. It sort of startled him awake. “What was that?” he said, looking around.

“Just a bump,” said Sene. And then she said, _Come here, vhenan._ And so he did. He put his head back down into her lap. He was so tall, but somehow he managed to fit. And when they got back to Val Royeaux, they tipped out of the carriage, and with several Inquisition soldiers marching in front and back of them—they _were_ the Inquisition, after all—they held hands, leaning into one another as they dragged their feet across the bricks on their way to the Boisvert Mansion. The city was an empty palace—tall and regal, sighing as it held them, the moonlight sudsing to the puddled walkways. Once back in their quarters, they undressed and fell into bed as if all of time and space had been designed as a precursor for this exact moment. They slept hard, simply, entangled as animals. Perhaps, after everything, that’s all they ever were.

 

Solas awoke in a dark room he did not recognize. It was cold, pre-dawn. He felt for Sene, found her hair, the long arch of her back, felt her shift beneath the covers. She was asleep. He was relieved. He got up to fix the fire. Neither of them had been present enough to stoke it the night before, and now it was just dead, blue embers on rock, and the room was cold. His head heavy and dense as a stone, he sat at the edge of the bed and tried to accumulate his bearings. Sobriety was like a knife in his eye, twisting him back into existence, and he felt anxious. It would not go away.

He looked back. How he wanted her, all of her. He knew now. He had never wanted something so much in his entire burnt-out existence. But he had learned last night, despite his bravado at the party, that somehow, courage still eluded him. At some point along the way, with her, he’d come apart, and he’d lost the ability to face what he was. He only knew how to be with her, and this taught him how to _be_ , right now, but this would not undo the past. He felt young and stupid. He was meant to be wise, clever, proud, but now, he knew that was just another costume. Another game, like anything else he knew. Thinking back to what had been before, he could no longer remember which way was up. But with her, he was stripped, exposed to the raw, fucked-up elements of living in a way that put his feet on the ground, made him remember what it was to be a man _._ And what he realized in the alley of Val Royeaux, as she stood from her knees and buttoned him away, smiled, was that he had been longing for this. More than anything. Years of silence, suffering, and disconnect, like smoke on the wind. He’d worked tirelessly to repress it all. But his mind, elegant creature that it was, had betrayed him once again. It had found a more efficient way to order itself, and now, he remembered. And he knew that if he did not tell her, he would lose everything. He just did not know how to proceed.

He found his clothes, folded in a neat pile in the armoire. The servants of the mansion had laundered and pressed them, and now they smelled good, of fresh linens and pine. He dressed and went back to the bed one last time to make sure she was asleep. Her freckled face, flushed in the firelight. He did not touch her. He knew that if he did, he would become helpless again, back buried in the bedsheets, just to feel the weight of her body beside his. He could not afford this. Not now.

 

He had no trouble getting by the guards at the jail. There were Inquisition soldiers now, in addition to Orlesian guards, and they recognized him. They sealed him into the cell block where all the cells were empty, aside from one. He went down the hallway, surveying black bars and empty, sagging bedrolls, a single, great lantern hanging from the ceiling. Then, he came to the very end, and there, awake, sitting in the dark on the floor with his head hanging between his knees, was Blackwall.

Solas sat down on the floor as well, leaned with his back against the bars of the opposing cell. When he did this, Blackwall looked up, surprised and confused. He was grizzled and looked unwell, as if he had not slept in days.

“Solas?” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“We’ve secured your extradition back to Skyhold,” said Solas. “Or perhaps you already knew that.”

“I did,” said Blackwall, rubbing his eyes with dirty hands. “I knew Josie had a plan, though I discouraged it. I am sorry, for what it’s worth. I understand you and the Inquisitor had a great deal to do with my release.”

“It is all right,” said Solas. “We were happy to help.”

“It’s not even dawn,” said Blackwall, glancing up at the high, dark windows overhead. “Does the Inquisitor know you’re here?”

“No. She is asleep.”

“I suggest you get back to her then,” he said. “She wakes up in a strange place, and you’re not there beside her. How do you think that will make her feel?”

“I know you’re right,” said Solas. “I’ll try to be quick.”

“What is it?” said Blackwall. “They way you look, it’s like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“How did you make the choice that you did?” said Solas, very blunt, very focused. “To come here, to face your past. Was it for Josephine? I want to understand.”

“Are you asking for yourself, or in general?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes, I believe it does.”

“Then I’m asking for myself,” said Solas, looking down now at the hard, black cobbled floor. “I’m asking for advice.”

“You’ve come here, seeking advice?" said Blackwall.

"Yes."

"From me, a man behind bars?”

“Imprisonment comes in many forms, Blackwall. You may be behind bars, but you found the courage to tell the truth about what you are. You are a freer man than most.”

Blackwall sighed. “You’ve always had a way with words. I suppose that’s at least part of why you're here.”

“Yes,” said Solas. “Again, you are right.”

“And I assume it’s also got something to do with the Inquisitor. I won’t ask for details. That’s none of my business, but I know that you wouldn’t be here without her if it were anything less.”

Solas did not answer.

“You’re a young man, Solas,” said Blackwall, focused on the grit beneath his fingernails. “Have you thought at all about your life with her—with Sene—after all this is over?”

“No,” said Solas. “Not rationally.”

“Do you consider yourself a man of faith?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, when you make choices, do you follow your gut, your bleeding heart, or do you rely on your intellect? Your…rationality? I ask, because you seem like a carefully measured man.”

“I am. Most of the time.”

“A man in love is never measured.”

“I have noticed. Believe me.”

“Tell me, Solas,” said Blackwall. “And if you truly want my advice, you’ll give me the truth. What is it about the Inquisitor that makes you love her so? And I don’t want platitudes. I don’t care that she’s beautiful, or that she’s a woman of many talents. I don’t care about her grace.”

Solas shifted, leaned forward off the bars. He rested his elbows on his knees to look at him. “She’s just—" He broke down then. "She makes it okay for me to be weak,” he said. “I have not had that—I have never allowed myself to have that. She does not hold back her love, and when she gives it to me, she just _gives_. So freely? As if her love is endless. And as if I, alone, deserve it. All of it, all of the time.” He realized then that he was shaking, incredulous. He felt emptied, sore. Like he’d just puked his guts out all over the stone floor, his spine ripped clean through his throat. He clenched his jaw, released, closed his eyes.

“She makes you feel like a man,” said Blackwall.

Solas swallowed, his mouth dry. His head hurting. “Yes.”

“And there is something inside of you that makes you feel unworthy.”

“I want to be worthy.”

“Then do not do what I have done,” said Blackwall. “Do not waste your most precious years guarding your pride. Whatever it is you’re hiding, Solas, tell her the truth. It won’t be easy. It will not be pretty. But if you don’t, then it is only a matter of time before you lose her. Do you understand?”

“Yes, but the courage, Blackwall,” he said. “How do I find the courage?”

“Where do you usually find your courage, Solas?”

“Now, or in the past?”

Blackwall leaned his head against the bars. “It depends on which one matters most. Your past or your present?”

“That is not an easy question.”

“Then that is the question you must answer,” said Blackwall. “And based on everything you’ve just told me, and the fact that you’re here at all, asking advice from an aging imposter you hardly know, a man you’ve played cards with once or twice at Skyhold, it seems to me your life in the present matters to you pretty damn much.”

“Do you know what happened that night you taught me to play Diamond Back?” said Solas.

“You mean the night you took me for everything I owned?”

“Yes,” said Solas, losing himself to a laugh, placing his hands, palms down, on the dirt of the floor. “That was the night I first went to her. It had not been planned. And yet, I went. Everything changed.”

“And here we are again, at yet another precipice, it seems. Would you go back to that night if you could?” said Blackwall. “Change your mind? If you knew it would make all of this easier for you. If you knew it meant simplifying your choices without her?”

“No,” said Solas, resolved. “No. I do not regret my actions.”

“Then that is your courage, Solas.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Whatever it was that made you go to her that night, you must find, it, take it back, and use it again.”

“I don’t remember. I just went. I—”

“You followed your gut,” said Blackwall.

“It cannot be that easy.”

“It is not easy. What you did wasn’t easy, Solas. It just feels easy now, looking back, because you reaped your reward, and somehow, you know you made the right choice.”

“Are you a man of faith, Blackwall?” said Solas.

Blackwall stretched out his great, brute arms, examined the backs of his hands, his callused palms. “I didn’t used to be,” he said. “I thought it made me weak. I left the crying to the women and the boys. But now, here, I know better. Josie was a catalyst. I saw something I wanted but that I knew I did not deserve. So I did what I had to, to make things right. And I did it knowing full well she may never take me back.”

“And that’s why you did it?” said Solas. “For her?”

“I did it because I couldn’t live with what I’d become. She was a part of that, yes. I wanted to be the kind of man that she deserved, but that required a change that went beyond her, and beyond what I felt. In any case, it’s up to her now. But regardless of the outcome, I have no regrets. And I will respect her decision, because that woman is stronger than I could ever dream to be.”

The sun had begun to rise now. You could see the pink and purple light filtering, dusty, through the high, arched windows. The night was over. Solas felt a pull, a tug from somewhere deep inside him. He closed his eyes. He pictured her, his focal point. His anchor. He held on as tightly as he could.

“Solas," said Blackwall, glancing through the black bars and the light. "Are you all right?"

Solas opened his eyes now, stared at his hands. They were sullied, blackened from the prison floor. "Hmm?"

"I said, are you all right?"

Solas looked up at him then, his heart beating out of his chest. "Perhaps," he said. "Thank you, Blackwall."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **END BOOK I**
> 
>  
> 
> Elven translations:
> 
> “Ame nar asha rad.” - "I am your green woman."
> 
> "Emma." - "Mine."
> 
> “Savhalla, lathal’lin. Lanem?” - "Hello, friend. May I?"
> 
> "Sathem." - "It is my pleasure."


	24. The Way Out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **BOOK II: FALL**

He watched her rouse from sleep, slowly. Like a cat, like crawling to the shore. First the legs, then the arms. She’d kicked off her half of the covers. They were in a ball at her feet, and she was full naked beside him. Like some feral wet dream. Possessed, he turned on his side to face her, smoothed his hand down the hard length of her spine, felt the dip, the freckled curve. The pale scar, ever-rigid. He grazed its familiar texture, and then she twisted into him, and her face emerged. It had been hidden deep in the pillow, her hair a great, breathing pile. Her eyes feel open, lazily.

“Hello, vhenan,” he said.

She smiled, instantly awake. She climbed to him, nudged him to his back. He opened an arm for her, and she crawled inside, buried her face into his bare chest. She inhaled, exhaled, then set her ear to his heart. “How long have you been up?” she said.

“A while,” he said.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong,” he said, pressing a kiss to her hair. “I went to see Cullen.”

“Cullen?”

He showed her the piece of parchment on the bedside table. “The letter, from Morrigan.”

She hid her face. “My head hurts,” she said. “It’s too early for the Inquisition.”

“I know, vhenan.”

“What does it say?” she said.

“Quite a lot, actually,” said Solas. “Though I can see why the Commander was so confused. It’s half Elvhen.”

“And?”

“Well, he got most of it. Though he did miss one very important part. Morrigan would like us to meet her in Crestwood."

“Crestwood?” said Sene. “Why Crestwood?”

“I believe she’s found something resembling our shrine. She has questions. She’s there now, and she'd like us to meet her very soon.”

"How soon?"

"As soon as possible."

She sighed, composed herself. “Well,” she said. “I guess if we have to do work, then at least we get to be somewhere pretty. I like Crestwood.”

“Me, too," he said.She sighed then, pushed onto her stomach, rested her chin on her chest so he could see her face. He pushed the curls behind her ears. "Thirsty?" he said.

She nodded. He reached for a glass of water on the bedside table.

Sene smiled, sat up, and took the glass. She drank the entire thing in about six gulps. "Thank you." She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, reached across him to put the glass back on the table. 

“You're welcome,” he said.

He sat up, too now, sheets pulled to his waist, leaning against the headboard to get a better look at her. Sene, this morning of all mornings. She was ungodly beautiful. Unfolding, like a flower in the wide open sun, and meanwhile, he was losing his heart to the butt of an axe, the blunt force. It almost choked him. And then, as if she could read his mind, she opened her bare legs and crawled on top of him, put her arms around him, and nestled her head into the hollow of his neck. Needful, to an unstable degree, he put his arms around her and his face into her hair. He closed his eyes and breathed. 

“ _Ara vhen’an,_ ” she said.

He gripped her by the arms then, lifted her gently into a sit. He just wanted to see her. She had her hands pressed into his chest, looked down at him, curious.

“You seem different,” she said, tracing her thumb across each of his eyebrows. “Is everything okay?”

“Of course,” he said, soft.

“In the carriage, on the way home,” she said, looking down, “last night. You were out of it. You said some things.”

He reached up, lifted her chin to find her eyes again. "I'm sorry."

“It’s okay,” she said. 

“Talk to me, vhenan.”

“I just—I get worried sometimes, Solas.”

“I know.”

“I want you to trust me.”

This was an arrow. It struck him, hard. “Of course I trust you," he said.

“I won’t push you, Solas.” She was fighting him with her chin. She wanted to look down. He had to let her. “That’s not who I am, but sometimes, the things you say—it’s like you’re asking me. To _push_ you. So that you can push me away.”

“Is that what it feels like?” he said. “Is that what you think I’m trying to do?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, putting her face into his chest. “I’m doing it wrong.”

“No, you’re not,” he said. “Sit up, please. Isene, look at me.”

She listened, sat up. He held her by her wrists. She was watching him now, searching out the insecurities. Where did they live? What were their shapes and noises? She’d sensed them, but she couldn’t see them, couldn’t get her hands on them. So elusive. His eyes were glass now. Shimmer, wet. She’d hurt him, or scared him. She pressed her palm to his cheek, then down to his neck and shook her head. “Just tell me what’s going on,” she said.

“I will,” he said. She could feel his pulse, fast, hard beneath her hand. He seemed to be choking on the words. He sat up, quickly from beneath her, gathered her hands into his, pressed them to his mouth. He looked her in the eye. “I will.”

She almost wanted to cry. But she wouldn’t. It was morning, and she was thirsty, and she hated crying anyway, and there he was, breaking beneath her, so devastatingly loyal. She could see it, in his eyes. She knew it already, but still, it made her weak that morning. It also made her needful.

Sene’s heart, a bright, hot coin with both sides the same.

“Okay,” she said.

He let go his breath. She didn’t realize he’d been holding it. He smiled, still somehow terrified, but relieved. He closed his eyes and pressed his forehead to hers. The touch, like a renewal between them. A reminder, hot skin. Breath shaking. She held the back of his neck. Something changed.

“I trust you, Sene,” he said. “I trust you. You must know this. After everything. _Lanas em dir’vhen’an. Sathan, Isene._ ”

She shifted, fitting to him, warm and growing hard against her from beneath the sheet. His mouth on her neck now. Helpless to her. “ _Dhruan in’na, Solas,_ ” she said to him _._ "You're a good man."

With this, he kissed her, hard, and she kissed him back. Just wanted to be taken by him. The night before, she had watched him assert himself to the entirety of Orlais, put butterflies into the air, sating the Comte’s “curiosity” _just for show_ , and it reminded her of how he could be when his eyes were clear—playful and sharp, a knife’s edge, the bright arrogance, youthful and earned, every golden fleck. He was proud and sure of himself in the most unexpected ways, but just like with anything, these traits seemed to come at a heavy price. His mind was too big, too shiny, too complicated, and Sene knew from experience that when things got twisted up inside him, the process of extraction could be brutal. She knew that part of why he loved her was for her relative simplicity. Sene tried not to let things get twisted up inside. She tried not to hold things inside. She didn’t like the way it felt, like a fist shoved in where it should not be. Patience was not her virtue, but somehow, with Solas, it had become a kind of calling.

She pulled him by the ears, and he put her onto her back. Lacing one hand into hers, he pressed it into the mattress above her head, climbed between her legs. There was no more sheet, only skin. Soft and hard, wet and dry. All the simple things. She knew now that he would consume her. She tried to reach down, to put him inside, but he found her wrist, and then, gently, slowly, he pinned that one down, too. Wordless. Still kissing her, deep, he worked his way to her neck, then back to her mouth again. He was focused and pure, gone to the moment. And she was so dire, soaking the bed sheets, and somehow, he found his way inside her on his own, and she felt him. He sighed, released, the unwitting deep sounds that he made with his voice, and she broke free as well, something primal she didn’t always understand, but that she knew she wanted. Liked him when he did this. Surprised her, took her.

He let go of her wrists then, straightened up onto his knees, resituating. She arched her back, lifted her hips off the bed to meet his height. Her hair, twisting around her face, red tempest. He reached forward to push it aside, and she gave him big, needful eyes, and so he left his hand there, by the side of her head, and he braced himself to her hips with the other, and then he began. He always started slow, shallow, she knew, to work them up together, the same. He was never abrupt, even in his most urgent capacity. He always took care. But then, over time, he let go, drove deeper, harder. She could feel him pushing all the way to the back of her, which was always a shock, no matter what. She had his length memorized, but still, it was the kind of feeling that choked her, made her squeak like an animal. She couldn’t help it. She almost laughed. He sensed this and smiled into her ear. She could hear the smile through his breathing. He pulled back. He was earnest. “Too deep?” he asked.

But she tugged him toward her again, even deeper. “No," she said. "Keep going.”

With this, he just nodded, reached for the headboard. She arched her back again. He went hard, and she lost her breath, and she could hear herself moaning, but it was like a kind of half-consciousness. She knew they must have been loud. The bed was old and brass and rattling into the wall, but these walls were thick. In any case, she didn’t care.

At some point, he broke a little, fell off with his face into her hair, still going, but slowing considerably, cradling her head in his hands, clutching to her hair, and then he pressed his forehead to hers. He was loud when he came. Sort of a guttural exhale, and then the long, low moans. His deliberate loss of control excited her, and she clung to his shoulders as his noises went on and on and on. Then, weakening. He slowed, and then he stopped, and then he kissed her shoulder hard, and he rolled out of her, onto his back. He shielded his eyes with the back of his hand as he caught his breath and said, “ _Ane ir’ina’lan’ehn’is, avise’ain. Fenedhis. Lanas em dina in’dialathen._ ”

He let his head fall to the side, to look at her. She was intent, still moving, flushed. So he rolled onto his side to face her, rested his head in his hand. His other hand, he traced to her thigh, held it hard as he looked her in the eye. He wanted to finish her, but he noticed then—she was already halfway there, all by herself, and his interest, piqued. He watched her, closely, as this was new and deeply compelling. She’d touched herself in front of him before, but it was always playful. Just to get a rise out of him, in foreplay. He’d never seen this. She picked up one of her knees, let it fall open, closed her eyes. He reached, unwitting, an obvious reaction, but the moment she felt him, she just set his hand away. “Almost,” she said, her gentle gasps.

He sat up so that he could see her, all of her. This discovery. He’d watch her face, then her body, then her hand. He could not choose. He set a hand to her forehead. The other to her heart. Held her. Perhaps it was in this moment, watching her exist, her mounting pleasure without him—she was so real—he knew he could never love anything the way he loved her, and this was both a massive relief and somehow deeply terrifying. His reaction was unexpectedly strong. A deep and protective affection, so exhausting, it confused him. This was his. She was his. And then, as he watched her swell to the edge, tip over entirely on her own, his eyes grow wide. He felt her hips rising, off of the bed. She broke, fizzled, drew still. Then she opened her eyes once more, looked at him, and smiled, and he was hard, again, and so quick. She made everything so fast. And he just shook his head in disbelief, pursed his lips. He read her demeanor. She wanted play. He smirked. “Well, that is one way to kill me here, vhenan,” he said. 

She stretched out. “Sorry. I couldn’t wait.”

He had to stifle a laugh. “Your impatience is your virtue, Isene.”

Then she rolled over, into him. She took a firm hold of him with her hand. He tried not to seem weak, but he was. The feeling choked him good. “I need you, Sene,” he said into her hair as she held him. Slow, full strokes. 

“Of course you do,” she said, smiling, as he lost his breath again, the sweat beading at her hairline, the red curls pushed back into the pillow. To her, this was not a brave declaration. It was merely a certainty. “I need you, too, but Solas.”

“Yes?” he breathed.

Then, she stopped. Her hand fell still. What was she doing? She looked at him.

For a moment, he looked just as he had the night before. There he was, laid bare to her in the back of the carriage. He’d almost confessed something. They were at a precipice.

Her breath shook, and she exhaled. And she surfaced.

It was like—it reminded her of that morning she’d stepped out of the Fade. Cole at her bedside. She’d been lost for so long, it was hard to remember what things had been like before. Before Solas. What had she been before Solas? What were the choices she made? Because now, she realized, in these moments of desperate exchange between them, rather than attempt to unravel him further, she just found herself unable to resist him, his smell, his voice. How he made her feel. It defined her. Somehow both brave and kept, his _avise’ain_ and yet, his anchor. If only he could live inside her, she thought. Then the rules would change, and the armor would fall, and he would tell her the truth.

But he could not. He could not live inside her. That was not love. They had to evolve. They had to become something more, together. She could feel it now, like a great, bright pressure mounting inside her skull, pressing on her eyeballs. His near confession in the carriage, everything Morrigan had said in the garden: the great darkness from his past, it was rising to the surface. And she knew that if she did not prepare herself, it would consume them both.

It was true that he needed her. He just wouldn’t tell her _how_ he needed her. And their sex, it was like a drug. Every time they got close—there it was. So easy. So good. So real. And she had always known that Solas, despite his arrogance, his charm, and his mastery of her body, was not used to things being this real. Maybe he had been once, but not anymore. And now, he was losing himself. Literally. Maybe, deep down, for a long time, because she loved him so much, and she trusted him, she was able to ignore all of this, or to play down its importance in her mind. But she knew now that she could not keep doing this. She could not keep allowing their bodies to derail him from doing the thing he had to do. Open up to her. Really open up, about everything. Because when he was inside of her, he _was_ brave. He came alive, and he always knew exactly what to do. This was a certainty, and it always would be, but if she kept inviting him to that place again and again in these critical moments, then he would start to think that’s all there was for him—her body. And that just wasn't true. He needed more, and this could not last. She looked back now to those three days she slept in the Fade, and his destitution in the weeks that followed. The hollows under his eyes, his watchfulness. Those weeks in which he was not inside her. How all he did was lie awake at night in fear for her life. And now? Was it so different? Then: Yes, she thought, correcting herself. Yes. This was not the same. After the Emprise du Lion, that was something else. She knew this. She had almost died, and he loved her, and that was grief. Their relationship was not predicated on sex. Sex was important, but that’s not what this was about at all.

It was about strength, his ability to let her in, fully. He would never figure out how to do this if she kept letting him in first. Because once he was inside, there was no way out.

“Vhenan?” he said, gently. He put his hand on her cheek, his fingers through her hair. So much time had passed. “Are you with me?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head, swallowing, coming back. She pulled away from him. “I just—all of a sudden. I don’t feel well all of a sudden.” She got to a sit, hung her head between her knees. She was mostly not lying.

Solas sat up, deeply concerned. He put his hand on her back. “Breathe, vhenan,” he said.

She leaned into him. He pressed his hand slowly up and down her back, in the way he knew would comfort her. He did not crowd her. How she loved him for this. “ _Enaste_ ,” she said. “I just need a minute.”

“I'll go get some more water."

“No,” she said, taking his hand. “Just stay by me.”

After that, he moved behind her and put his hands through her hair. He picked it up off her neck, cooled her down and scrubbed her scalp. And in an instant, she was crying. She turned around to face him.

He put his thumb to her cheek, catching the tears, and shook his head. “Sene,” he said.

“What?” she said.

“I’m doing this.”

“No,” she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, sniffling, feeling hot and embarrassed. “I’m just—there are so many things.”

“Sene,” he said—he pleaded, like he knew what was coming. He was falling to pieces around her now. 

“Please,” she said. “It's okay."

“It is not okay.”

“I said I won't push you," she said. "I won't. That's not what this is."

“I'm not me,” he said. It was abrupt. Loud. A blue calling through the air between them. He grabbed her by the shoulders, squared her up, looked her in the eye. It scared her at first, but he was ragged, confused—it was familiar, that same temperament he’d shown her inside the Temple of Mythal. “Not in the way you think you know me. I am not entirely who you think I am. And that is only the beginning. Do you understand?"

She just stared at him, waited. He broke down a little then, shivered, lost his grip and put his hands in her hair. A power center. She didn’t understand. She picked up his face, let his tears hit the bedsheets between them. She braced herself. "Like Blackwall?" she said. "Is that what's happening?"

He did not answer. 

"Solas?" she said. "Are we—are you—?"

“This isn't good," she said.

She shook her head. “Okay,” she said. It was okay. "Solas—"

"It will be," he said. "I promise, Sene."

"I will wait."

This is what finally drew him. He looked up. “Why?” he said, out of nowhere. The question, it was so abrupt. He put his palm on her cheek, his thumb to her chin. He studied her, desperate.

"Why what?" she said.

“Why will you wait?" he said. "What do you stand to gain?"

"What do I stand to gain?" She was so confused by this. It was like a hand on her throat, yanking her away, straightening her up. She knew the answer immediately, as she so often did, but still, it strangled her. "How can you even ask me that?"

"Because, I know you love me, Sene, but I need to understand." His voice, breaking. "I have not known anyone like you in a very long time. The way you love me, how you look after me. I have felt it—in these moments of weakness. You just, you _keep me._ "

"I trust you," she said. She took his hand, put it over her heart. "You're my best friend, Solas. What else am I supposed to do? Leave you? Now? You're not making sense."

"I am out of my mind, Isene."

"I can put you back in your mind, but you have to let me."

"I want to."

"I need your help," she said. "I can't do it all by myself."

"I could lose you," he said, shaking his head. "Losing you, it would not be good."

"You said things were already not good."

"Yes, but that would destroy me." His voice dropped, plunged into the dirt. "I don't think you understand. Do you know what happened when you almost died in the Emprise du Lion?"

"No," she said.

"When I almost could not save your life? When I put you in the Fade, and I forced to live without you for just _three days?_ I withered away, Sene. I had to send Cole to find you, to bring you out, while I was busy hiding from my own darkness, because if I did not, I was afraid that you would wake up, and you'd find me, a man so hopelessly wrecked with rage that you no longer recognized him or the mangled, breathless life form he'd become. That is what I am without you. That cannot be good. And now, I keep catching myself, getting lost inside of your unconditional love. It is my fault. I have worshiped you, and the mortal body you hold. But that cannot continue, not in this way. I know that, and so do you. And there are versions of this story in which I did not go to you that first night. I did not undress you. I was never inside you. We never were, and in those other versions, right now, I am another man entirely. I am not a man at all. But after those cursed creatures in the Exalted Plains destroyed my friend from the Fade, I became so terrified of the lonely madman I was forced to become, that I somehow found the courage to show you what I felt for you, and I do not regret it." He held her face in his hands then. She felt his thumbs tracing the slants of her cheekbones. "I am trying to find it again, Isene," he said. "The courage. I promise."

He had unraveled now, lost his breath. Ripped open and red raw. He hung his head. He let his hands fall from her face. Then he dug the heels of his palms into his eyeballs so hard, like he wanted to pry them clean out. She held him by the wrists. "Don't do that," she said. She pressed both of his hands to the bare center of her chest. She got to her knees so that she could meet his height. She found his eyes, held them. They were wide, soft, slushed, reddened at the rims, the irises picking up the light from the windows, from the fire, all of it, and yet, they looked darker somehow. Her broken flower. "I believe you," she said, and she dropped his hands and fell forward, hard, and clamped him into her embrace. Her cheek to his shoulder, one hand pressed to the back of his head, the other wrapped tightly to the muscles of his back. "I love you."

She felt him hesitate, so aware, so deeply loyal and yet so apprehensive as he tried to read the moment, to trust that it was real and that she was telling the truth. That she was not angry. But she had never been angry, and soon, he brought his arms around her, too, slowly, tightly. “Sene," he said. He inhaled, his breath shaking. He buried his face deep into her hair, into her neck. She felt his damp cheek on her shoulder. 

There was nothing left to say to him, not that morning, not in Val Royeaux. She just held him instead, in her arms, his warm body, its familiar weight and shape. It was what she needed, and it was what he needed. It was bodies, but it wasn’t sex. It was just them. _This,_ she thought, deeply reassured, was real.

 

“Cullen,” said Sera. They were seated, just the two of them, at the breakfast table downstairs. The rest had all gone back to their quarters to ready themselves for the long ride home, and now, Sera was spreading strawberry jam to a piece of toast. Cullen sipped from his tea periodically while reading from a very long document. So long, in fact, that it curled all the way down to his feet.

“Yes?” he said.

“What do you think they’re doing up there?” she said. “Sene and Solas.”

He raised his eyebrows, peering at her from over the top of the parchment.

She groaned. “I don’t mean _that,_ ” she said. “I hear them bumping bits all the time. It’s not that I’m asking.”

He sipped his tea. “All right. What _are_ you asking?”

“I just—” she said, no longer interested in her toast, letting it drop, dry and hard to the plate. She appeared to be sad, or at the very least sullen, pensive. He wished he knew her better. “I just—what do they _do_? When they’re together, all alone. Because they’re alone and together _all the time_.”

At this, Cullen shifted. He set down his reading. “I suppose they could be doing anything,” he said. “Perhaps they’re having a conversation, like we are.”

“Perhaps,” said Sera, picking up the butter knife, pressing the dull edge to the flat of her thumb. “I mean, with Dagna. It’s all right, yeah? There’s bumping and then there’s _bumping._ But mostly, it’s just like, we _be._ You know? _Be._ ”

“Yes, well," said Cullen. "I think I actually understand that. To _be._ Perhaps _that_ is what they're doing then. They’re just _being_. I don't see why not.”

“But it’s…they’re so _big,_ ” she said, setting down the knife, tracing a finger to the rim of her water glass. “Can something that big ever just _be_? Sene and Solas. It’s like, they are _the world._ There’s this—I can feel it between them. It’s all important. All _e_ _lfy._ But more than that. Like the end of the world is coming, only it’s not the end of the world. It’s like…like there's no way out. Like it’s _them_.” She looked up then, quite suddenly, found Cullen’s eyes. “I’ve never had real love,” she said. “I like Dagna. Maybe I will love her someday. Probably. Whatever that is, I guess I’ll know it when I feel it, right? But until then, I just don’t get it.”

Cullen studied her. He was not used to such earnestness, such intense interest, not from anyone, and never so casually. "You have a point," he said, folding his hands on the table in front of him. “There is a...direness between them. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it is there.”

“Right? It _is._ What is that? Is that just what love is? Just like, _love_? So heavy?”

“I wish I wasn't so confused myself. Then, perhaps I could help you understand.”

“What do you _think_ it is then, Commander? Is all of it like theirs? _Love?_ The kind that’s all hands and gut punching and antlers?”

This confused him at first, but he knew it was only language. He felt a familiar loneliness then, and he shook his head a little, tried to make it go away. "I believe...” he said. “It’s been a very long time for me, Sera. I really don't know much, but I believe that love is...what it has to be."

"What it has to be? What's that?"

"Just—" He sat back in his chair, looked up at the ceiling. "Love brings us the things we need the most." He looked at her. "It makes us whole. Perhaps for Sene and Solas, love is heavy and big, because that's what it has to be. For them."

"Or maybe it's not so heavy and big," said Sera. "Maybe it just seems that way to us, because we don't know what it is—the thing that makes them whole. When they're together, I mean. Is that sense-making?"

"Yes, I believe it is," said Cullen, smiling. "You might just be right, Sera."

“Anyway,” she said, seeming to grow self-conscious. “I just needed to get that out of me. Sorry for all those feelings. I get them sometimes.  _Feelings._ But you listened, so you’re nice. Thanks.”

He felt a tug then, somewhere deep. "Of course," he said. "Any time. If you'll have me."

Sera snorted, returned to her toast, only now it was cold. “Piss it,” she said and got up for more coffee. "You want anything from the kitchen?"

"I'm fine," he said. "But thank you."

"Suit yourself." She was gone.

Cullen just smiled now. Oddly enough, this feeling—it was almost like relief? He had surprised himself.

_Alive in there, Commander?_

So many things.

 

Meanwhile, Morrigan stood inside a dark cave, holding a torch, looking up at a painting on the wall. A tall figure in wolf’s clothing, his hands on the face of an innocent. “Do…I…know you?” she said aloud, startling herself awake. She looked around, clutching to her stomach as if fueled by some awful memory from the past. “That is not the way out,” she said, backing away. “Why…why did you leave me here?”

But then she heard a voice, calling to her from the mouth of the cave. “Lady Morrigan?" said the voice. "Lady Morrigan, is everything all right?”

She looked back. It was just one of the Inquisition soldiers. So young, so strong. A grasshopper in gold armors. He had his sword drawn, at the ready. She held out her hand.

“Stand down,” she said. “Everything is fine, soldier. Everything is fine.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Elven translations:
> 
> "Lanas em dir’vhen’an. Sathan, Isene.” - "Promise me. Please, Isene."
> 
> “Dhruan in’na, Solas.” - "I have faith in you, Solas."
> 
> “Ane ir’ina’lan’ehn’is, avise’ain. Fenedhis. Lanas em dina in’dialathen.” - "You are eternally beautiful, little flame. Fuck. Let me die in these sheets."


	25. The Mother We Share

The fastest way to get from Val Royeaux to Crestwood was to cross the Waking Sea, and then ride straight up the coast. It was a hard journey. It took them seven days, three of which were spent in the Frostbacks, freezing half to death inside scores of heavy leather tents all lined up in a row. They rode with a cavalry of about seventy-five Inquisition soldiers. They’d arrived in Val Royeaux with a full hundred; however, somewhere directly west of the Frostbacks, Sene diverted twenty-five to escort Leliana, Josephine, and Blackwall back to Skyhold and promised Josephine that Blackwall would not have to sleep in a cell pending her return, that he could keep to her quarters instead.

“There will be scrutiny,” said Sene. She was piled into light leather armors and white furs. The air was cold and wet. The winter season, descending. “Not everyone understands what’s happened. So I don’t want him wandering. But I don’t want him in a cell either.”

“I—” Josephine hardened into a kind of deep, level gratitude that drew her eyes to the earth between them. She wore a blue, wool scarf pulled up to her chin. “Thank you, Inquisitor,” she said. “You have no idea what this means to me.”

“Yes, I do,” said Sene. “Now go.” She sent Josephine off with the soldiers and the horses and the carriage holding Blackwall, and soon they rounded off into the distance, like smoke.

Sene’s hair was in a snowy maelstrom. So red, thought Solas, you could see it from a thousand miles away. The furs she wore were his. They were big, and, on her, against that hair, dramatic. None of her own furs would have been warm enough to carry her through the Frostbacks. He’d belted them to her himself, made sure they were tight. But she did not want braids in her hair that morning and wore it down deliberately, almost as armor. She was so fully formed, he thought as he watched her. Standing there, talking to Josephine at the helm of her army—a bright, cold piece of morning. They slept beside one another every night. Sene slept warm, and Solas slept cold. Always the same. She’d curl into him like a molten core, and he would fall asleep to the heavy rhythm of her breathing. She seemed fine, but he knew better than that. She was resilient.

Every night since leaving Val Royeaux, he'd dreamed of a weird, blue room inside her, like a blank piece, a hole. And yet, it was not. It was just unfinished. It was empty. But it was not forever. She was young, and every time he found himself standing in this warm, dark place, he somehow knew it was meant for him, and he was supposed to live there, to fill it with light.

At the time, Solas still thought he had it in him to figure out how to do this. He thought he knew everything. He would sit down on the floor and draw shapes in the condensation on the stone, and then he’d close his eyes and meditate against the music of her insides. It was pretty, the sound of her. Earthly. Wind chimes and little shells, and so familiar. But he couldn’t place the song in his memory. He only knew it was from the distant past, some new version of an old melody. It took care of him now. He thought this familiarity would make it easier, that all he had to do was figure out what it was, where it came from, find it again, and that would give him back his courage. Perhaps in the form of a candle, some kindling. And he could light a little fire in that dark room, and make a home in Sene. Why not? He owed her everything. Couldn't this be it?

 

_Solas, still so full of dreams. You should know by now, lost elf, that if it were that easy, you would have found it already. Instead: a cracked jewel for your heart. How do you think the world works when all you know is sacrifice?_

 

News of the Inquisition’s return to Crestwood had spread quickly. Three separate Dalish clans had traveled in from the surrounding areas, some with a mind to settle for good. The Inquisition arrived in the late morning, let the troops settle at Caer Bronach. Sene wanted to immediately travel to the village, and she sent messengers to each of Crestwood's Dalish clans, asking for their company in the city, and promising personalized visits from the Inquisitor herself at some point over the next few days. Cole, Dorian, and Bull had arrived from Skyhold the night before. Sene had sent for them specifically the morning they left Val Royeaux. She wanted Bull and Dorian there for pomp, as they had been part of the team who’d vanquished the high dragon. Cole she just…wanted nearby. After everything in Val Royeaux. He was a comfort.

Meanwhile, Morrigan was in the wild. She had gone on some sort of starlit hunt two nights before and still had not returned. She’d been traveling with Scout Harding and a small guard of ten Inquisition soldiers, otherwise alone, and Harding promised to send scouts periodically to update Sene on their progress. She was close to something. That was all she would say. There were purple whispers of Mythal in the trees, some great freezing music. Morrigan had written it all down in her long, clean penmanship—so stern, it seemed a thousand years old.

And yet—Morrigan. Her handwriting. It was pretty, like her. And there were always these odd little curly-qs at the ends of all her words. Playful. To Sene, this was a strange, warm gesture that made her curious, made her miss Morrigan. It was a quiet pull, but certain. What kind of woman writes like that? It turned out that their bond in the garden had not been incidental. It resonated now, like music, and somehow, because of it, Sene found herself trusting Morrigan intensely. Her sadness seemed old, like Solas’s sadness, but it was something else. It was deeply female. A maternal angst. Sene did not know how else to describe it, and she did not know much about Morrigan, but she felt it.

Morrigan made Sene think of her own mother who was tired and wistful and had never much liked to be bothered with the thrills of daily life. She hid away in the shadows of their camp like a specter, drew pictures on the stone with oil paints. She’d once been a great huntress, like Sene, but then, she lost a child to the cold hands of winter, and after that, she was not the same. Sene was her second and only now, and she’d left most of the rearing to Sene’s father, and the clan at large. Still, she loved Sene, though she would not call her Sene—just Isene _—_ and she would make her these lovely paper flowers, all colors and shapes, and Sene kept a whole collection of them on a shelf beside her bedroll back home, and she gave them all names— _Dusty, Element, Sylvia, Toy._ They were stupid names, but they were names. She wondered now if they were still there, the flowers. Perhaps Morrigan could tell her. Or Solas. Was this something they could find in the Fade?

Sene wore a dress to the village. It was not like her, and yet, suddenly, it was. She had discussed the matter with Josephine before they parted in the Frostbacks, who wanted her to appear strong but nurturing. A dress, especially after their success in Val Royeaux, would send a message of empowerment and self-assurance. It would also emphasize her role as the Herald of Andraste _above_ her role as Inquisitor. A curious choice, Sene thought, but the religious mantle, according to Josephine, was more important in terms of sparking morale, as, given Sene’s Dalish heritage, it had the power to unite elves and humans across religious boundaries. She was unprecedented, an icon, memorable. Sene was not sure about all of this, but Solas, as he braided her hair in the bell tower of Caer Bronach that morning, had reassured her that Josephine was right. _You are still you, vhenan,_ he said to her. _At the end of the day, when we return to this place, it will only be you and your people. Find comfort in how they know you best._

They went to New Crestwood, arrived on foot. In the past several months since closing the rift beneath the lake, the city had undergone a great deal of rebuilding. The sad wooden shacks had all been painted in the colors of morning: blue and green and the orange lights of dawn. Little gardens of carrots and chives and a schoolhouse with a big, red door. The tavern had also been repainted and restored, and several new merchants had moved in, and with the High Dragon gone, the surrounding farms were on their way to revival as well.

Sene entered the village in the afternoon sun with only a small entourage—Solas, Sera, Cassandra, Dorian, Cole, and Bull, unarmed and casual behind her, plus a modest guard and Cullen directing a cavalry of about fifty at the gate. They were met with excitement and mild, warm weather. A great, colorful army of children, like pinwheels, rushed her, smelling sweet like syrup, and some of them were Dalish, but most of them were not. There were city elves, and humans. They all wanted to touch Sene. To touch her hair. Some of them asked for her to take it down so that they could see her fire, but then their mothers appeared out of nowhere and scooped them up, blushing, apologizing in backwater Fereldan accents that endeared Sene and, yet again, made her long for home. It was weird and new, this longing. She didn’t like nostalgia. But she liked these mothers and reassured them that it was no trouble.

She took down her braids and let her hair get big. When she did this, she looked back at Solas who watched so intently, she did not know whether he was happy or sad. But then he smiled at her, like some crack fucking sunbeam parting the clouds, and it was good. Then, she looked away. She loved him, and it was just some holy answer that made her feel like she was a part of something big. Part of her knew that she was young, and that their bond was reckless, furious in its velocity. But she also knew that it was headed somewhere. It was not aimless or chaotic. It was just untamed. It needed…time.

Solas watched, standing tall beside a rose garden. Seeing Sene in this capacity, it both unnerved and enticed him. Beyond anything he could understand. He liked seeing her this way. It felt right and real. And yet, it reminded him. The Emprise du Lion. The Fade. His mind peeled away any time it got close to surfacing. He just felt this empty, cold pain now, and it cut straight to the bone, making him shake his head in agony. This, he still had not come to terms with. The future that had been taken from them, so swiftly, so much violence—he could not deal. He sometimes wondered in vain if that had been his only chance. Gone now. The girl and the wolf. He wanted so badly to talk to her about it. He just couldn’t. There was too much to say. Everything. He felt his heart racing in his chest, grew light-headed, closed his eyes, and breathed.

Dorian stood beside him now. He put his hand on Solas’s shoulder. “Are you all right, friend?” he said. “You look…paler than usual.”

Solas opened his eyes, blinked. “Yes,” he said, fixed again. On her. “I am fine, Dorian. And you?”

“Disappointed, to be honest.”

This jarred him awake. “Disappointed?” said Solas.

“You whisked off to the city of sex and flowers in such a hurry, I was robbed of your magical insight. Bull has been bugging me for days. _Have you learned Solas’s invisibility spell yet?_ I swear, the man would have us naked on top of the war table. I’m sure you understand.”

“I have not forgotten,” said Solas. “I will show you, as promised. The moment we return to Skyhold.”

“Excellent,” said Dorian, squeezing Solas’s shoulder once, then letting his hand fall.

“How are you really, Dorian?” said Solas. “After what was learned at the Temple?”

Dorian was silent for a moment. The two men still did not look at one another. The entire conversation was had while watching Sene—children tugging at her pale gold dress, bringing her handfuls of dirt and flowers.

“I am…recovering,” said Dorian, hesitant. “I am pleased you would think to ask.”

“Of course,” said Solas. “I know it must have disturbed you.”

“Indeed, it did.”

“I wanted you to know you are not alone in your confusion. It disturbed us all. Though in different ways, I imagine. And if you wish to know more—I am well-versed. I could try and help you fill in the blanks.”

Dorian sighed. Then, “That is most kind of you, apostate,” he said, his guard shaky.

“Any time, Tevinter,” said Solas. He glanced at him then, smiled. Dorian smiled, too, just the slightest smirk. Sort of knowing, but earnest. Then, he went back to Bull who put an arm around him, and together, they shared a secret.

Solas watched then as Sene, up ahead, plopped down to a sit. Sera was there now, too, her arms all full of red flowers and children. The new mayor had since arrived, a tall woman in a gray dress. She stood by with her hands clasped in front of her, smiling, demure. The noise in the village was a wonderful pluck and melody. So many voices. Bull laughed. Cole spoke with one of the serving girls from the tavern. _You have colors and ribbons inside your home,_ he said. _They are all there to please him. He would like them, and he would like you, too. Perhaps you should open your door. Let him inside._ Solas felt a tug on his jacket. He looked down. It was a girl, a Dalish child. He could tell by her worn, green dress. She was too young for the vallaslin, and her hair was a ripe brown and straight as a tooth. She held one tall, purple flower, its stem clenched in her fist, and she beckoned him to get closer.

Charmed, Solas got down on one knee. He met her eyes. They were big, blue. The girl was simple but bright, like a whistle. “ _Savhalla, da’len_ ,” he said.

“ _Savhalla, ha’hren,_ ” she said.

“What do you have there?”

“ _Blar or’era’vun_ ,” she said. “I like purple. Do you?”

“Yes,” said Solas, smiling. “Everyone likes purple.”

“Here,” she said and handed him the flower.

“ _Ma serannas, da’len,_ ” he said, “but what is this for?”

“For saving my clan’s farm,” she said. “You and the Lady Herald. You made the dragon go away.”

Solas felt himself soften, almost into nothingness. This pull, into some deep, terrifying confusion—and then, a purple flower. He was speechless.

“You can give it to her if you like,” said the girl. “The Lady Herald. I don’t mind.”

“What is your name, _da’len_?” said Solas.

“Nydhalan,” said the girl. “You can call me Nydha.”

“Nydha,” he said. “I am Solas.”

“I know,” she said.

He held out his hand. She shook it, bravely.

Then, a woman appeared. Solas looked up. She had the same brown hair, the same blue eyes. Her vallaslin was just like Sene’s. Mythal. “I’m terribly sorry,” said the woman, taking Nydha by the shoulders.

Solas stood, tucked the flower into his jacket. “It is not a problem,” he said. “Nydha here has informed me that your clan’s farm is safe now. I am pleased.”

“Yes,” said the woman, blushing. “It is…we are working on it. I thank you. What you did—”

“It is our pleasure,” he said, and he smiled. “It is why we are here.”

“Well,” said the woman. “We’ll let you return to your duty. _Sal sura, lethal’lin._ ”

“ _Dar’atisha, lethal’lan,_ ” said Solas. “Until next time.”

Nydha waved as her mother dragged her away. He waved back.

And after this, for the first time in months, Solas came to a decision.

 

It was in the late afternoon that Solas and Sene left the village. He quietly informed Cullen, who sent with them a small detail, but Solas asked them to keep their distance. They were not headed far. There was a cave nearby that he remembered. More like a grove, or a secret. It had a great, wide open ceiling and these massive stone statues of Ghilan’nain. There was a wide, beautiful tree overlooking this strange hole in the earth, and a pool, and just the thread of a waterfall. He wanted to be alone with her. Right now. With the dress, and the hair loose and big around her bare shoulders. There was no other time. They held hands as they went inside, and she marveled. He knew that she would like the pool, and the waterfall. She had always appreciated water. Their detail stayed hidden outside, guarding the long entrance. Together, they went and sat at the willowed bank, facing each other. Sene touched the water, making ripples in the surface. The light filtered in pieces through the trees overhead. The air was still.

“The Veil is thin here,” said Solas, parting the ends of her hair with his fingers, studying her skin, the long angle of her collar bone as she continued to look at the water. “Can you feel it?”

“I can,” she said. “Like a husk. Crispy.”

“Crispy?” he said, smiling.

“Yes.” She nodded, closing her eyes. “Crispy. Thank you for taking me away.”

“You looked like you could use a break,” he said. He fixed her hair into a loose braid, just a heavy rope over her shoulder. She’d hardly noticed as he did it. That was how regular the sensation had become.

“I’m tired,” she said.

“I met a Dalish woman today,” he said. “In town. Her daughter came to give me a flower.”

“Really?” said Sene, opening her eyes, lighthearted now.

“Really,” he said. “The woman reminded me of you.”

“Why?”

“She had your vallaslin,” he said. “The little girl reminded me of you, too. She was like the little version of you I’d go visit when—when you were asleep in the Fade.”

“It’s still hard for you to talk about,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, trying to smile, exhaling and gathering her hands into his.

“It’s okay, Solas.”

“It’s probably just because they were both Dalish,” he went on. “Their clan has a farm outside the city.”

“A Dalish farm?” said Sene.

“I know. I was surprised as well.”

“It’s a rarity. We must go there.”

“I agree,” he said, examining her hands, pressing them into his, kneading them with his fingers. But she took one of them away and picked up his chin. She found his eyes.

“Everything okay?” she said.

He brought her knuckles to his lips. Overhead, a bird sang in a high, lonely voice. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Just—the Dalish woman in the village, she had the vallaslin of Mythal. She looked the part. Maternal, but hardened somehow. She was older than you.”

“I always thought my vallaslin just looked like wings,” said Sene, seeming confused, searching his eyes for something, anything. He could feel her.

“Why did you choose Mythal, vhenan?” he said, very serious. He wanted to know. “For your vallaslin.”

She took heart, thought hard. But then she just shook her head, brought a hand to her face. “I don’t remember,” she said finally. “I was young.”

“You must remember something,” he said. “Why Mythal? Was it really just because it looked like wings? Why not Andruil, the huntress?”

“Mythal was different,” she said. “My mother was a huntress, too, and she chose Mythal. The marks were pretty, yes. But Mythal seemed strong. I suppose I was just trying to be like her—my mother, that is, to make her happy.”

“I understand that,” said Solas.

“Why do you ask?”

"Tell me about her,” he said then. "Your mother."

Sene looked down. He could tell he’d touched something, an old pain.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“It’s okay.” She looked up. “I’m not upset, Solas. I’ve just been…thinking about her lately. Ever since we got here. I don’t know why. We aren’t close. She’s not entirely well. I had a sister who died when I was very young, and after that, my mother changed I guess.”

His heart then, like a brick, dropping to the bottom of a lake. He hadn’t known this. Any of this. He realized then how little he knew about her—her life before. It made him eager, made him guilty. “How did your sister die?” said Solas.

“She got sick. It was winter. I guess there was nothing anyone could do.”

“I’m so sorry, Sene.” He held her warm face in his hand.

“I don’t even remember her,” said Sene. “I was a baby.”      

He felt the back of her ear, brought her in, kissed her forehead. “Then I am sorry for your mother,” he said.

“ _Enaste, Solas_. You are a kind man.”

He took a deep breath. The world around him, the whole thing was filled with a quiet kind of pain. Like a wisp, a ball of purple lightning floating far away on the river. You could see it, and it was bright and real, but it was still so distant. You’d never get up close enough to touch it. Ever.

“What about your mother?” said Sene. She was looking right at him, innocent. “You told me that story at Skyhold, but knowing you, I wasn’t sure how much of it was a fable, and how much of it was true.”

This made him smile, that she was so willing, so honest with him. “Some of it was true,” he said. “My mother was—” He stopped to unravel. He could feel some rusted piece of his heart coming free. The whole thing seemed to be rebuilding itself, slowly now, shedding old parts, but there were just so many parts. “She tried to be reasonable,” he said. “She was a kind, nurturing woman. A good woman. Like you, Sene. She was never hard on me, but our lives were hard, and merciless, and this demanded a great deal of me. It was never easy.”

“Do you ever miss her?” she said.

“Yes,” he said, his fingers climbing the braid he’d put into her hair. “And no.”

“We have that in common.”

“We have more in common than you think, vhenan.”

They sat then for what felt like a long time. She looked back to the water, put her hand on the surface. Like silk. Solas touched her hair. At some point, their hands found one another and settled in the grass between them.

“I feel like we’re being watched,” said Sene.

“Are you certain?”

“No,” she said. “It could be anything. I just don’t get the sense that we’re alone. There is…a bigness.”

_A fly in the ointment. A whisper in the shadows._

“I want to show you what you mean to me, vhenan,” he said then, only half-listening to her now, watching the grass and how it grazed to her skin. To be grass, he thought. What would it be like to be grass.

“You don’t have to do that, Solas,” she said. “I know what I mean to you.”

“This is different,” he said. “I want to give you a choice. A choice that no one else can.”

“What choice?”

He reached for her chin then, turned her face toward him, bold. “It’s about this,” he said, brushing his knuckles across her cheekbones.

“The vallaslin again,” she said.

“Yes, the vallaslin.”

“What about it?”

“Yours, and the woman’s in the village. All of them. I have a hard truth, Sene.”

“What’s wrong?” she said. “Just say it, Solas.”

“They do not necessarily mean what you think they mean.”

Her face buckled, some subtle confusion. “What do the vallaslin mean?”

“The Dalish—you have adopted them. Made them your own. That is important for you to remember right now. But their original purpose, going all the way back to Arlathan—it was much more than just to honor the elven gods.”

“What was it?”

"Slave markings,” he said. “They were slave markings.”

She just stared at him for a moment, frozen in time. “What?” she said.

He shifted, weary. But he was determined as well. “Nobles would brand their slaves in honor of the elven god they worshiped,” he said. “And the gods themselves—well, they carried out a similar practice. It was far more deceptive.”

Sene shook her head. “Abelas?”

“Yes,” said Solas. “He is bound to Mythal. That is what the true vallaslin does.”

She brought her fingers to her cheeks. “You know this from the Fade?”

He firmed his jaw, nodded, only just. “Please trust me,” he said.

“Of course I trust you,” she said. “I just don’t understand.”

“Which part, Isene?”

“The part where you waited this long to tell me the truth.”

He searched his mind, his body. He was not sure why he’d waited. “It was never important,” he said. “I almost, once, but—at Skyhold.”

She looked away. “Not important?” she said. “Slave markings? Solas. What must you—how you must see me? All this time—”

“No,” he said, and he held her face in his hands. She still wouldn’t look at him. “This—this does not affect how I see you. It never has. You have done your people proud, Isene. You are not a slave. You are _not_ Abelas.”

“But I look like him,” she said. “Don’t I? Our faces, these stupid drawings. They’re the same. We’re the same.”

“You serve no one’s will but your own, Isene. The Dalish vallaslin—it is just a symbol. Perhaps its origins are misguided, but that no longer matters.”

“How long have you been walking around with this knowledge and not saying anything?” she said.

“A long time,” he said. “It is a mistake. The vallaslin, it used to anger me, I will admit it. But it does not anymore, not after knowing you. I believe now, that the value of the Dalish vallaslin is subjective.”

“Subjective?” she said.

“Yes.”

“But how can it be subjective when we do not know the truth?”

“The truth is irrelevant, vhenan. These markings—the Dalish have usurped them. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. For you, the truth has changed.”

“Then why tell me this?” she said. “If it is so unimportant? If you care so little, why tell me at all?”

“Because I love you,” he said. “ _You_ are important, Isene. You deserve to know the truth. And you are free to deliver this knowledge to the Dalish however you see fit. They might listen to you. Believe me when I say I’ve tried myself, but they would have none of it.”

“You’ve tried?” she said. “When?”

“In the year before I met you. And some before that. They would not trust me, vhenan. And why should they? I am an apostate, a stranger, bringing them knowledge from the Fade? But I am not a stranger to you. I knew that you would want to know, and I knew that I could tell you, and that you would believe me.”

She blinked, a few tears escaping. She caught them with the heel of her hand. She was not distraught, merely overwhelmed. “You say they don’t mean anything. But what if they do?” she said.

“Like what, vhenan?”

“I’ve never liked my vallaslin.”

“I know that.”

“I don’t feel like me anymore.” She looked up at him, patched with confusion. She so rarely came apart like this. She was nothing like he was. She was strong. “These markings on my face. They say I belong to Mythal. What if I’m not me?”

“Then I can remove it,” he said.

“What?”

“I can remove the vallaslin.”

“With your magic?”

“Yes.”

She just looked at him, curious. “I’ve never heard of it,” she said. “If something like that existed, wouldn’t I have read about it? Somewhere? It seems important.”

“It is not…common knowledge,” he said. “But I can do it, and I will. But you must acknowledge that it would not be for me. This is your choice, Isene. The choice that I alone can give you. Just know that I love you—every part of you, including this, if that is what you choose. But the choice is yours.”

She exhaled then, looked down, trying to hide her face. He waited patiently, both of her hands back inside his. He squeezed them. He could almost feel the heat prickling at the back of her neck. Sene was never indecisive. She was not regretful, and she did not mourn the past. Whatever she chose, he knew that it would be right.

“I want you to do it,” she said, without looking up.

“Are you sure?”

Then, her whole face. “Yes,” she said. “I trust you, Solas. This is what I want."

Bright and eager. The choice had been unemotional, he could tell. She’d found a way to rationalize, to free herself.

“Very well,” he said.

She closed her eyes then as he drew his focus. He framed her face with his hands, pushing the hair back behind her ears. He studied the pale green vallaslin, closely, searching out the edges with his mind one last time, memorizing them. Soon, this part of her would be gone forever.

“Will it hurt?” she said.

“No, vhenan,” he said. “It will not hurt.”

After that, it did not take long. He covered her face with his hands. He could feel the energy between them. Like a whip. Then with a rush of green—with Solas, it was always green—he pushed his hands to the back of her head where they caught in the nettles of her hair, and finally when the magic blinked and paled, and the ritual ended, she opened her eyes, and she was new.

When he saw her there, he felt his heart slide open, wet and human. “ _Ar lasa mala revas, Isene_ ,” he said to her, a near whisper.

“I am free?” she said.

He nodded. “You are free.” And then he watched as she leaned out over the pool, peered into her reflection. She grabbed both of her cheeks, rubbed them furiously. It was almost comical. Then she just stared for a while. Solas waited, patient, subdued, his elbows resting on his knees.

Finally, she looked at him. “Is it okay?” she said. She had her hands on her head, in her hair. Like she always did when she was feeling self-conscious.

He smiled, unwitting. Her bare face had closed him into a tight, warm fist, and all he wanted was be with her. “You're beautiful, Isene,” he said. “ _Atisha._ So nervous.”

Then, she jumped into his lap, straddling him in an instant. Her hands clinging to the back of his neck, she kissed him with a kind of incredible force that she alone could wield. He held her, tightly. She pressed him to his back, put him into the grass, and then she pushed his arms up over his head and held them down at the elbows, and he relented, growing hard as the rest of his body went limp, and as soon as she felt him, she sat straight up, undid the belt at his waist, worked him into her hand, and it was—no waiting, so fast. The dress. He was suddenly inside her, the familiar warm and the wet contours, holding him, such terrible ecstasy, as she sank, and he sighed, and he put his head back and his eyes closed, arms still limp overhead. She leaned into him, kissing him again, and slowly, his hands found their way back her hair as she held him to the grass by the side of the pool. He gave everything to her, wanted her to keep him there for as long as possible. His recourse, shot. He wanted nothing more than to be at her mercy. He knew it now. Like the broken man that he was. He just wanted her. Everything he did, and everything he would ever do. He was selfish and weak. But he just wanted her.

 

A sad, hooded creature stood by. He watched them from above, leaning against the meat-hearted trunk of the biggest tree at the top of the waterfall. The Dalish woman, Inquisitor, her familiar face, her red, true hair undone to the breeze as she clutched to her lover at the bosom of the earth. It was really him, thought Abelas. Fen’harel. Bare-faced, in the flesh, beneath her. So young-seeming, so familiar. And yet, these actions—they were unpredictable, even for him. He appeared to be a man and nothing more.

Their mortal noises now. Abelas could hear everything. Such shared pleasures, an intoxicating confusion. He looked away. He should not watch this, he knew. So he left, and he went into the village, and he stayed out of sight. But the people there, in Crestwood, they were suspicious of him. Everything was deadened in this place. Like trying to hear a song in the next room by pressing your ear to the wall. And yet, the music was loud. Something was happening. He wondered if Fen'Harel could feel it, too. If that's why he was here. Drawing them all forth, together, as children. For Abelas, though, it still cut. Fresh wounds. A thousand hot blades in his eyes, and he was weary.

He went into the tavern, and he sat down by himself. The serving girls avoided him, but one of them, a city elf, Fereldan-born, was kind, and she came and asked him for his order. He did not know what to say, just told her he was thirsty, so she brought him a glass of water.

“You look pale, sir,” she said. “You are one of the Dalish?”

“Yes, I am,” he said, and he drank the glass of water in one long, frenzied gulp.

“Well, we welcome you,” she said, and she curtsied. The gesture confused him, but this woman had a warmth about her that he recognized. “I suppose you know the Inquisitor is here?”

“I have seen her,” he said. “And the man she travels with. The elf with no vallaslin. Like you.”

“You mean Solas?” she said, and she smiled. “Yes, he is always by her side. Together with the Iron Bull and Ser Dorian Pavus of Tevinter, they slew the high dragon that tried to destroy our village. They are heroes.”

“Interesting,” said Abelas.

"You might take down your hood, sir. So that I can see your face.”

“Oh. Certainly.” He put the hood back, tried to smile, but it was difficult for him.

“Your markings,” said the girl now. “They are not unlike the Inquisitor's. But I don’t know the Creators that well. Which one is that?”

“Mythal's,” said Abelas.

“Mythal,” she said. “The All-Mother, am I right?”

“Yes, you are right.”

“Well, they’re lovely,” she said, and she looked away.

This, of all things, drew him. Now, he smiled. “Thank you,” he said, and he folded his hands in lap and sighed.

“Is there anything else I can get you?” she said.

"More water, perhaps,” said Abelas. “And just—remind one more time."

“Hmm?”

“The elven man by the Inquisitor’s side, you said he goes by Solas?"

"Oh, Yes," she said.

"He goes by nothing else?"

"Not as far I know." She refilled his water glass now with the pitcher in her hand. A clean, perfect pour. Red-cheeked. “We know him as Solas.”

_One cannot remain in between forever._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Credit:
> 
> "A fly in the ointment. A whisper in the shadows." - This is adapted from one of Flemeth's lines in Dragon Age 2: "I am a fly in the ointment. I am a whisper in the shadows."
> 
> "One cannot remain in between forever." - Morrigan, Dragon Age: Inquisition
> 
>  
> 
> Elven translations:
> 
> “Blar or’era’vun." - "Flower of night."
> 
> "Sal sura, lethal'lin." - "We'll see you again, friend."
> 
> “Dar’atisha, lethal’lan." - "Go in peace, friend."
> 
> "Ar lasa mala revas." - "You are free."
> 
> "Atisha." - "Be calm."


	26. The Winged Girl

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _tw: some suicide ideation_

After. They lie together in the grass now. Warm, wet creatures. Her head burrowed deep in the crook between his chest and his shoulder, she was beholden. She traced a finger along the uneven seams of his shirt, the worn hem. He tugged her into him, put a hand in her hair and kissed her forehead with such decision. She never wanted to leave this place.

He was put away but still undone, his belt in a loose pile by the pool. She slid her hand past his waistline and held him there. Soft. He shifted and turned toward her a little, growing slightly in her hand. An unwitting response, she knew. But she didn’t necessarily want to bring him up again. She just wanted to feel him. She could tell he was not used to this. She was so rarely still, and she was fully aware of the fact. But that day, she craved stillness. And it took him a moment, but he figured it out, relaxed against her. Things were calm. She kissed his jawline. He kissed her eyebrow. Then, he turned to face her in the grass.

“I like you like this,” he said, fitting his hand to her waist.

“Like what?” she said.           

“In a dress.”

She raised her eyebrows. “I have you in a vulnerable position, Solas. Be careful.”

He smiled, closing his eyes. “Do I want to provoke you?”

“Perhaps.”

“I like you in a dress,” he said, smoothing his hand up and down her bare arm. “It makes me feel steady, Sene. As if our lives are not so…difficult. And I can picture you standing somewhere warm, like a small, quiet bedroom. Or in the kitchen, perhaps. Tall and sunlit, your hair down, and you are calm, because _we_ are calm. And I deserve you, and the world is not ending, and the days are just…days, and you are wearing a dress. I very much like the idea, Sene. I don’t mean to say that I don’t want you all the time. Or that I _need_ you in a dress. I certainly do not. I just—I like you. In a dress.”

As he said this, she could feel him changing inside the moment. Not weakening. He seemed oddly strong then. Composed and in control. He arched his hips toward her now, a deliberate movement. He grew solid in her hand, then stiff, then unrelenting. His eyes still closed. And his words—they were so beautiful. She responded. She didn’t want to rush him or the moment. She just wanted him to feel at home.

 _Beholden._ Sene had never truly been _beholden_ before. Not like this. She had been rapt and dreamy and molten and entirely taken by his abilities with language, with words. In the past, she’d felt rushed to please him, overtaken with the need to make him beg, make him moan, make him come. But, beholden. It didn't matter what he was, who he was, or what happened between them. This was something new. Especially for Sene, and especially now.

“I have never really worn a dress before Val Royeaux,” she said, touching her forehead to his, strengthening her grip on him. He held tightly to her now, eyes still closed, breath quickening. “I did when I was a little girl,” she went on. “But even still, it was rare.”

He broke. “ _Sathan, Isene,_ ” he said, just resigned. Begging her. “ _Tuas palal em i’mar’da’lav_ _bell’ana._ ”

“I won't stop,” she said, working him into a pale frenzy. “And I will wear a dress every day and let you take it off of me every night. If you are mine.”

“Do not let me leave this place, Isene.”

“I won’t.”

She felt him renew his grip then, clutch a hand to her hair, and growl, and gasp. She finished him, felt him pulsing, giving, kissed him hard as it happened. Deep, pulling him through to the end. There was not much left inside him, not after their sex. But it was enough. She let him down slowly. He caught his breath. It had been so impulsive. She didn’t care. She put him into her embrace, comfort, felt him shiver against her, and she pressed their bodies together. He was so big, so warm. So tall.

“We don’t have to go back,” she said.

He smiled into her hair, his breath still fast, but coming down. “Whatever you want, vhenan,” he said.

Together, in the grass, they melted. They went down into the earth like water.

Then, “Inquisitor.”

A voice called from the mouth of the cave. They looked at one another. It was Cullen, timid, but he would not have been there himself, would certainly not have disturbed them if the matter weren’t urgent. They sat up, quickly.

Solas found his belt. He was still hazy, like gauze, like rain. He fit it around his waist as Sene straightened the straps of her dress. “Hang on, vhenan,” he said. He picked a few leaves from her hair, smoothed it in the front. Then, he took one last, long look at her. The sun was going down. It was almost night. They were losing the day. He pressed his thumbs one more time across the arched planes of her cheekbones, longing. He smiled, as if he might lose it again, right there in front of her, but he didn’t. He kissed her cheeks, one by one, and then he helped her to her feet. She shook the little pieces of grass and nature from her dress. She adjusted his collar, his belt, put him back together again. They were complete.

“It’s all right,” called Sene. “Come back, Commander.”

Into the grove, he appeared. He was tall, alone, holding a long piece of parchment. “I’m very sorry to disturb you, Inquisitor,” said Cullen. “I hope the two of you know I never revel in uprooting you from your privacy.”

“Of course we know,” said Sene.

“I know how rare it must be.”

“Please, Commander,” said Solas, softly. “We are aware of our duty to the Inquisition, and to you. Apology is unnecessary.”

“Right,” said Cullen, scratching at the back of his head. “This is from Morrigan.” He handed Sene the note. “It came in with one of our scouts just a couple of hours ago. I tried waiting, but once the others returned to Caer Bronach, it became unclear if you would…also be returning. Tonight.”

“We understand,” said Sene.

“I’d give you the report myself,” said Cullen, “but all I can tell is that it’s urgent.”

Sene studied the note—Morrigan’s long, strange handwriting. It went on and on and on. But the light in the grove was no good. She could hardly see anything. “It’s too dark,” she said. “And anyway, from what I can tell, this elvhen is ancient. I have no idea what I’m looking at.”

“Let me,” said Solas. She handed him the parchment. Casually, he snapped his fingers, and a butterfly appeared. The same little flamed creature he’d conjured for the Comte in Val Royeaux. It hovered, casting a light over the note so that Solas could read the words. Sene smiled, marveled, tried poking it with her finger. It danced away.

“Vhenan,” said Solas, bringing it back with the nod of his head. “Don’t. I need that.”

“Sorry,” she said.

“Maker be,” said Cullen.

“Oh, I apologize,” said Solas, glancing up briefly, smiling. “I might have warned you that was coming. Sene is used to my magic. It is only fire, I assure you.”

But Cullen wasn’t looking at the butterfly. He was looking at Sene. “Your face, Inquisitor,” he said. “It is—bare.” He squinted down at her, hard, in the butterfly’s light, his eyebrows puckered. He was deeply surprised.

Sene brought her fingers to her cheeks. “Oh,” she said. “My vallaslin.”

“How is it possible?”

Solas was looking down, away at first, but then he met the Commander’s eyes, head-on, steeled. “I am responsible,” he said.

“It is remarkable,” said Cullen, shaking his head. “I had no idea magic could do that.”

“Most people don’t,” said Solas.

Cullen straightened up then, put his hands on his hips. “We’ll have to figure out how to…approach this. It is a change. I’m sure Josephine will want to speak with you.”

“I know,” said Sene. “It was impulsive. I—”

“Do not apologize, Inquisitor,” said Cullen. “This was a personal choice, I imagine. It is neither my nor the world’s place to interfere.”

“Wise words,” said Solas, smiling. “You speak well, Commander.”

“Well, thank you.” He studied the butterfly then. “You say that’s only fire?”

“Yes, Commander,” said Solas. “It is only fire.”

“Okay,” said Sene, growing impatient. “Can we please move on? What does the note say, Solas?”

“Right,” said Solas, glancing back to the parchment, “To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what the note says.”

“You’re not _sure_?”

“We are to meet her at dawn,” said Solas. “There are directions here, to some sort of clearing in the area. That’s all I can gather.”

“Hmm,” said Cullen. “If you’re willing to assist me in the translation, Solas, I can draw up a map tonight.”

“That would be most helpful.”

“Did she find it then?” said Sene. “This _shrine_ to Mythal?”

“I imagine so,” said Solas, focused, his brow tense. “Or…something close. There’s a great deal of jibberish here.”

“What’s the matter?” said Sene.

“Nothing.” He handed the note back to Cullen. “Can we meet you back at the fort, Commander?”

“Of course,” said Cullen. “I’ll head there now. Take your time.”

“Thank you,” said Sene.

He nodded. “Inquisitor.”

Once he was gone, Solas sighed. “Are you ready?” He caught the butterfly on the back of his hand, its little red wings, flickering.

“Hold on,” she said. “Can I borrow your butterfly?”

“Of course, vhenan. What for?”

It was very dark now, and she had to pee. He let the butterfly flit to her shoulder.

“You know, you don’t have to hide, Sene,” said Solas, smirking, as she walked away. “I’ve seen you pee before.”

“I know,” she called back to him from behind a wide tree, hiking up her dress. “Just habit, I guess.” The butterfly made a low, whirring noise at her ear. It was small and very warm, and it seemed like him. Like Solas. She could recognize him now, through just his magic alone. His little essence. His truth. She’d know it anywhere.

 

They held hands on their way back to the village. There were horses there. It was too far to Caer Bronach to move on foot. The Inquisition detail followed on all sides, keeping their distance, but present. Alert.

"Solas,” said Sene, looking up at him as they walked. The sky was clear, and the moon was big.

“Yes,” he said.

“I have a question.”

“Of course.”

“You don’t have to answer right now.”

With this, he stopped, called forward to the guards. “Hold a moment,” he said. They halted without a single question, without looking back. Then he gave her his full attention. “What is it, vhenan?”

She looked around. The world had stopped. For them.

“I was just wondering," she said, nervous. "This choice. The one you gave me, Solas. Is it a choice you would be willing to give others?”

He held both of her hands now, tightly between them. He drew them up, pressed them to his chest. “You mean, removing the vallaslin?” he said.

“Yes. And the history that comes with it.”

He paused a moment, his face hardened to the thought. Curious, a tall stone. She was surprised he had not thought she’d ask this. Or perhaps it only seemed that way now. “Do you understand what you’re asking me, Sene?"

“Yes,” she said. “I do. I’m quite serious.”

“It is something to consider."

“Really?”

“It would be a serious undertaking,” he said. “I am not sure now is the right time.”

“I agree with that.”

He was deep in concentration now, working through something in his mind, jaw clenched. “Perhaps when Corypheus is behind us,” he said, “we could revisit the subject? It would take a great deal of planning, and work. A pilgrimage of sorts. It would not be easy.”

“I know,” she said, and she smiled, soft and open, tore one hand from his grasp, placed it on his cheek. He seemed so tense to the idea. Willing, but concerned. “But it’s the right thing to do, Solas. We have to try.”

“Remember, vhenan. The Dalish don't trust me. They never have before."

“You said a little Dalish girl walked right up to you and gave you a flower today in the village,” said Sene. “How is that for trust? Don’t underestimate your worth, Solas. You’re not just an apostate anymore. With the Inquisition, you have carved out a place in this world, made a name for yourself, and so have I. This is just the beginning. Together, we could change things. We could help make things better for the elves. Give them a chance. Don’t you think?”

He smiled then, low, serious, and he kissed her. “You have come so far, Isene. Yours is a rare and marvelous spirit,” he said, studying, fingers behind her ear.

"It is?" she said.

"Yes," he said, “with great big hair.”

She smiled at this. She shoved him. He caught her. He laughed. No matter the stakes, no matter the setting. These were their tendencies.

 

The Inquisitor had been detained by the mayor in her private residence—one last gesture before heading back to the fort. Solas waited outside. Aside from the two Inquisition soldiers on either side of him, he was alone, leaning against a lamp post, very poised, hands clasped behind his back.

Charter approached. “Solas,” she said, nodding gently in a sharp, professional capacity.

“Yes, Charter.”

“I have a matter of small urgency that I need to discuss with you and the Inquisitor. Do you know how much longer she’ll be?”

The elf was tall, but not as tall as Sene. Elegant, but a hard soul. “I do not,” said Solas. “What seems to be the problem? Perhaps I can assist on my own.”

“There is a Dalish man in the tavern,” said Charter. “He isn’t causing trouble, but he is alone, and some of the locals find him suspicious. He is new.”

“Are there not at least three new clans in the area, here specifically for the Inquisitor?” said Solas. “Surely a new Dalish face is nothing unexpected. Even if he is a bit off.”

“There are,” she said, “but I questioned him myself, sir, and this man cannot produce a credible name for the clan from which he hails. Also, he is just…strange. And when I mentioned I was from the Inquisition, he has asked for you, specifically. By name.”

“For me?” said Solas.

"Yes,” she said.

“This man,” said Solas. And he knew. Immediately. “Can you describe his vallaslin? Is it like the Inquisitor’s?”

“Yes,” said Charter. “It is more ornate than hers, but the design is the same.”

“I see,” said Solas. “I will look into it right away.”

“Very good.”

“When Sene is finished,” he said, “tell her to keep to her duties and see to Cullen at the fort. I will find them when I return.”

“Well met, sir.” She nodded once.

 

He found Abelas seated at a booth in the very back of the tavern. It was a dim, stuffy place with high, vaulted ceilings and a chandelier lit entirely with candles. Many of the villagers and serving girls smiled or bowed as Solas passed them by. He was familiar here. He was accepted, even beloved. In most ways, he had not fully processed this yet. He merely reacted, because that is what Solas did. It is what he was good at and what had always been expected of him. This, in Crestwood, it was just like Val Royeaux, grappling with the noble bullshit of Orlais, only on a humbler scale. Solas had a penchant for ingratiation, for blending, and because of his unmistakable charm, near constant success. If there was one thing that Solas did well, it was to manipulate people, to make them believe exactly what he wanted them to believe. Nothing more and nothing less. But now.

It sort of felt like before, all of this. He actually _cared,_ but with Sene and the Inquisition, the stakes were somehow even higher. Because there were all these little things. Little things he had not had before. Like her smell in the morning, or the tangles in her hair, her small, weird stories of blacksmiths and treetops. Her hands, her insides, her long back. The strength of her. The freckles. These creature comforts. Butterflies and bells and bedsheets and purple flowers. And then. There was everything else. Everything that she’d brought with her. Sera’s cookies and Bull’s advice and Dorian in these quiet exchanges where nothing seemed to happen, and yet, _everything._ These were the reasons he found himself waking up in the morning, looking forward to each new passing day. They carried him, protected him, invited him and made him whole.

Solas had never had a problem finding a cause to lead, or designing himself per the stark geometry of duty. These things were practically what he was made for. But now, finally, we come to the small, sad truth of this story. Since his devastating failure at the Temple of Sacred Ashes, meeting Sene, and then joining the Inquisition: Solas had somehow tripped into a kind of whirlpool of mortal, boyish wonder. He forgot his duty. He became a man. He made friends, and he fell in love. He found himself indescribably happy.

Could he really give that up? Could he really sacrifice everything he’d gained over the past year and go back to the way things used to be?

 

He approached Abelas, wearing his duty to the Inquisition. He sat down and watched the tall, big elf from across the table. A young man he knew well, and who he had not spoken to in thousands of years. What had happened between them—that is a story for another time.

“You’ve come,” said Abelas, oddly relieved. “I did not think you would come.”

“You asked for me personally.”

“Indeed,” said Abelas. “It is good to see you, Solas.”

“What is this about? Did you follow us here?”

“I did not. I arrived in Crestwood two days ago," said Abelas.

“What are you doing here?” said Solas.

“In Crestwood, or in this strange little tavern?”

“In the tavern," said Solas. "Let’s start there.”

“I’ve nowhere else to go,” he said.

Solas felt a strange pull then. He opened up, felt himself loosen inside that room, inside that moment. “I am sorry,” he said. “I know how this must be difficult for you. It was for me.”

“I saw you,” said Abelas. “Before. Outside. Recognized you.”

“Where did you see me, Abelas?”

“I saw you and the red-haired Inquisitor. Together. In the grass.”

Solas paused. He had not been ready for this. He straightened up, fast, stern. He felt his jaw go tense, sat back in his seat, troubled. “What did you see?” he said.

Abelas subdued, looked away at first. It was clear he hadn’t realized what he’d said, his brow very heavy. But then he brought his eyes back and said, “It is not like you think. I did not…watch.”

“Then, what is it like?”

Solas wanted to unnerve him all of a sudden. Abelas, showing up out of nowhere. Here he was, and he had seen them, had made mention of her hair, and this bothered Solas. There were certain things about Sene that were Solas’s alone to possess _._ Her hair, and how it looked and felt when he was inside of her—that was one of those things. 

“I was confused,” said Abelas. “I’d stumbled upon that hilltop by mistake. I heard you. I looked down. I saw, and I left.”           

“What confused you?” said Solas. 

“I—from everything I have gathered,” he said, “the Dalish do not look so kindly upon you, Solas. The Wolf, I mean.”

Solas folded his hands on the table for a moment. Then, he unfolded them again, studying his callused palms. “Wolf,” he said, very even. “That is a brand. A very old brand. The man to whom you speak today is not the  _Wolf._ ”

“Solas,” said Abelas. “That is still what you’d prefer?”

“Yes.”

“Good. But the Dalish are frightened of the Wolf, Solas,” he went on, as if nothing had happened. “This has become apparent to me, even in just the short time that I’ve been here, floating in this...world. They’ve cast you as a villain? I had some idea before, but I did not know it had grown this severe. I don't understand.”

“The Dalish are confused,” said Solas, picking at the edge of his sleeve. “They mean well. I would change their minds. Given enough time, and the chance, of course. But I did not come here to discuss my actions or my intentions with you, Abelas.”

“Is she your chance?”

“Excuse me?”

“The Inquisitor.”

“This is not about the Inquisitor.”

“But you were with her. Surely you must be using her for something?”

“The Inquisitor is not a pawn.”

“But she _is_ Dalish.”

“Yes, she is,” said Solas. “I can see now why Mythal appointed you to your station, Abelas, despite your youth. Nothing gets past you.”

”You appointed me to my mantle, Solas. You told me to see to the Well. That was the last time I saw you. Before the Temple, of course.”

”Abelas—“

“If she is not a pawn,” said Abelas, “then what is she? Something more? A new queen?”

“Not everything is a game of chess.”

“Then, this is love. You love this Dalish girl?”

Solas shook his head, disbelieving. “Yes. Though I’m not sure that this is any of your business, Abelas. Not today. What do you want?”

“I saw you, at the Temple,” said Abelas. “That was a surprise. I came here, because I heard a calling. That was also a surprise. Now, I find you again. With her. Your relationship with the Inquisitor, this _Herald of Andraste,_ it is intriguing. I wish to understand.”

“My relationships are not curiosities to be held and studied. They are mine. This one especially.”

“Do you wish to be perceived as a man?”

“I wish to be perceived as I am.”

“You know what I mean,” said Abelas, leaning back, resting his arm, long and straight along the back of the booth. “Are you happy here?”

Solas put a hand into the air then to hail the serving girl. “You’re asking a great number of questions, Abelas.”

“Is that wrong?”

“No,” said Solas. “But you might want to tread carefully. You don’t want to step into something you cannot escape.”

“You mean like quicksand.”

“That would be one example of something inescapable, yes.” The serving girl was near. Middle-aged, elven, bright-faced with bone straight hair and strong teeth. She smiled upon Solas as if she knew him, and he ordered them each a glass of wine.

Once she was gone, Abelas said, “Your people, these new and confounding creatures, they look upon you with adoration. Even now.”

“These are not my people. They are her people.”

“But they know you. They are, in some way, yours.”

“The Inquisitor is charitable,” said Solas. “She places high value on the morale of the lower class. It is one of her greatest assets as a leader. So we come to these villages often, just to visit. Yes, they know me.”

”That is good to know,” said Abelas, suddenly pained. “Does the Inquisitor know you are the Dread Wolf of Dalish folklore?”

“No,” said Solas. “She does not.”

“Why?” said Abelas.

The serving girl returned. She set a tall glass in front of each of them. Solas thanked her graciously. Ignoring Abelas, she curtsied and said in a high Ferelden accent, “ _Sathem,_ Solas. Give my regards to her worship.”

Solas smiled, warm, tilting his head toward her. “I will do that, _lethal’lan._ ”

Once she was gone, he noticed Abelas, a long, nervous glare. Solas sipped from his wine without breaking eye contact. “Is there a problem?” he said.

“No _,_ ” said Abelas, leaving his wine untouched. “Are you up to something?”

Solas smiled, only just, set down his glass and let his fingers graze at the stem. “Ah, the paranoia of Arlathan. I cannot seem to escape it, no matter where I go. Why do you ask. Are you worried about me?"

“Yes,” said Abelas, "and I ask because here you are, a high ranking member of the most powerful religious organization in Thedas. One of the people, and yet, farther removed than any of them could ever hope to understand. You let them get close, but only just. Meanwhile, you are in bed with the leader of said powerful religious organization, who also happens to be Dalish. If the Wolf were hoping to rally elvhen troops in the modern world, he would need to curry favor with a mass population of elves who distrust him. This would be one way for him to do that.”

“You give me a great deal of credit,” said Solas. “Have you forgotten how long it’s been?”

“You deserve all of it,” said Abelas. “And no, I have not. I have not forgotten, Solas. How we were friends.”

Solas cleared his throat, slid his glass of wine to the wall.

There was a long silence then, in which Abelas, curious, picked up his own glass of wine from the table and drank from it, generously. He put it back down again and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “It is weak,” he said.

“It is fine,” said Solas.

“I have another question.”

“Hmm.”

“If the Inquisitor is not a pawn,” said Abelas, “then why haven’t you told her of your true identity?”

“She knows my true identity,” said Solas, growing angry again. “It is the rest who are mistaken.”

“That’s a good spin.”

“Beware your tone.”

“I apologize," said Abelas. Kicked, like a dog.

“Indeed,” said Solas. “If you’re going to treat me like Fen’Harel, then prepare to be consistent. For he is not as forgiving as Solas.”

“I know that."

“I do not wish to give orders, but if you call her a pawn one more time, I may be forced to…react.”

“There is no need to react."

“Good.” Solas finished his wine. In the background, the bard sang. The candles flickered. “Now, I was sent here by the Inquisition to investigate a mysterious Dalish elf who orders nothing, speaks to no one and yet skulks around the tavern for many hours on end. This would be you. You’re making the locals uneasy, and as you’ve already pointed out, these people are under my protection. So I must ask that you either reevaluate your cover or leave. Alternatively, you could come with us, join the Inquisition. I’m sure the Inquisitor would be thrilled to have you. Such knowledge that you possess could be prove very valuable to her.”

“Oh,” said Abelas. “I appreciate the warning, and the advice. But I don’t believe I'm prepared to join another organization, now, but I do appreciate the offer. I have been passing as Dalish in my travels, but I was not aware that Dalish elves do not typically hang around in cities.”

“Some do,” said Solas. “But you lack certain social graces, Abelas. You must be friendlier. Even the Dalish have their particular charm.”

“I understand. Perhaps you can teach me?”

Solas smirked. “I do not have time for that. Not now.”

“You were sent here by the Inquisition,” said Abelas. “But you mean the Inquisitor.”

“In a manner of speaking. Her presence was requested personally, in addition to my own, as she is Dalish. But she has many important tasks to attend to this evening. I was sent on my own, in her place.”

“You are her most trusted agent.”

“One of very few, yes.”

“So it is she you serve now?” said Abelas.

“I’m sorry?” said Solas.

“The Inquisitor. The _Herald of Andraste_.”

“I do not serve her,” said Solas.

“Mythal is near,” said Abelas, lowering his voice then, leaning forward. “Can you feel her? She beckons from this place. Calls out. It is like one million burning stars. I wonder what she thinks of you. Don't you miss her?"

“It is your vallaslin that does that to you,” said Solas. “I can remove it. Free you from her.”

“No.”

“The choice is yours,” said Solas.

“Tell me her name,” said Abelas, softening. It was odd, as if he were entering now into some sort of secret.

“Whose name.”

“The Inquisitor.”

Solas studied him, chose carefully to engage.

“Sene,” he said, even the shape of it on his tongue—small and round, it tasted red. “Her name is Sene.”

“Sene?” said Abelas. “I have not heard this name.”

“That is because it is a nickname.”

“Nickname?”

“It is shortened. From Isene.”

“Ah,” said Abelas. Now, he smiled to himself, swirled the wine in his glass, and drank. “Isene. The Dalish girl who has usurped the Wolf is named Isene. Tell me, is she truly like fire, or is it only a name?”

Solas stared at him, hard. He said nothing.

Abelas, however, did not sense this. He was caught up, reeling off something unforgivable. “Her hair alone bears resemblance to such a unique _sal’melin_ ,” he said, “does it not?” He, again, did not understand his mistake. He looked up.

“Are you finished?” said Solas.

“I am merely curious.”

“Yes, well,” said Solas, very still. “You have no idea how many _curious_ men I’ve been forced to deal with this past week.”

“Have I offended you?” said Abelas.

“No,” said Solas. “Though your lack of awareness does not surprise me, I understand.”

“I am sorry,” said Abelas. “I should have known. You defend her honor. You have laid claim to her.”

“Claim?” said Solas, shaking his head. “Mortal possession is not what you think it is, Abelas. It’s different.”

“You teach me this, and yet, you are not a mortal. Can I believe you?”

“I have lived in this world,” said Solas. “I have bled here. I will die here.”

“You also created this world.”

“I have not forgotten, Abelas. That changes nothing.”

“You look like a mortal, and you act like a mortal, and you bleed like a mortal. But I saw what you did beside that pool." Abelas leaned in, his voice very low, discreet. "You removed her vallaslin, like Fen'Harel. And then she offered you her body. You took her offering. These are all acts of godhood. Mythal would say the same.”

Solas had to gather his bearings, clutched the edge of the table with both hands. “Abelas,” he said. “Sene’s vallaslin did not hold the same significance as yours or mine. And she did not _offer_ me her body. That is not how this works. I am not her god and I am not her villain either.”

“Then what are you?”

“I love her, Abelas. Are you this confused?”

“Are you?” said Abelas. “Mates, you say. These actions speak to the heart of a conflicted man. You have embraced this new world, though I am not sure why. At first, I thought it was a scheme to put things back, to get Mythal back, but now—it seems to be for Sene, and that…changes things. When you look at her, what do you see?”

“I have no answer for that,” said Solas.

“I am speaking in earnest,” said Abelas, “and with respect. Do you see the future with her? Will you participate in marriage rites? Will you put a child inside her?”

Solas put his elbows on the table, pressed his forehead hard into his hands. “That is enough,” he said.

“I only want to understand,” said Abelas. “Because, after what you did, she is—she is as good as your creation. Is she not? So whatever you say, however the two of you live your lives, you are still her god. And the legends, they tell her that you are also her villain. And she does not know the truth. Tell me, Solas. If you truly do…love Sene, how do you live with that hanging over your head? What will you do?”

Solas put his head down on the table. He closed his eyes and went away.

 

Where he opened them again, everything tasted wet. He was back there, in that same dark, blue room inside of Sene. Familiar. Only now, he was not tired, and he was not alone. She was there, sitting cross-legged on the floor. Not _his_ Sene. This Sene was fourteen. Scrawny and long, her bow and arrows laid out neatly on the floor beside her. She held in one hand a hammer and in the other a large piece of stone. There was something different about the room now, with her in it. She smiled.

“I know you,” she said. “ _Ha’hren_.”

“Do you?” he said. He was leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets.

“Look up,” she said.

He did, and he noticed. The thing she’d done. She’d made a window, hammered it out of the stone herself. Pale light broke hard, a square beam on the wall. “Thank you, _da’len_ ,” he said. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to do that for days.”

“I can’t do it all by myself,” she said. “I’m not even sure how I got here.”

“I brought you here.”

“Of course,” she said. “Because you’re the _Dread Wolf_.”

“I am not what you think I am, _da’len._ ”

“What do you think I think?”

“I’m not sure.”

“If we take this path,” she said, “we cannot go back. You said that to me. Once.”

“No,” he said. “I _will_ say it to you. They're very different. I have not met you yet, _da’len._ ”

“Then how do I know?”

“Because you are me,” he said.

“Right,” she said, looking down at the hammer and the stone. He noticed then, her hands were a little bloodied. He wanted to worry, but he didn’t. He knew she would be okay.

But would he?

“It is time,” she said then, looking up at him with her glowing eyes. Omens. Little playing cards of green. He was blowing away. Goodbye, Solas.

“Time for what, vhenan?” he said.

“Time to choose.”

In this moment, he sort of wanted to die. Just like Abelas had predicted. He wanted to die. He wished some great wave of mortality would come and take him away, a set of teeth to gnash the cords of his neck. Light him on fire. Put him into the water and hold him there until he drowned. Out of his misery. It was not the first time he’d felt this way, but it was the first time he finally admitted it to himself, and just how fucked-up it was. How fucked-up he was. And the gravity of all the things he'd forgotten, like the blood on her hands, it slammed him hard into the earth. Face first.

 _She is so beautiful_ , he thought. _So fast. So free._

But the great molten scales, they descended upon him then. They judged. The million burning stars, the littered knife. The winged girl.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Elven Translations:
> 
> “Tuas palal em i’mar’da’lav, bell’ana.” - "Keep fucking me with your hand, forever." OR "Never stop fucking me with your hand." OR just, "Never stop." (Pick your poison.)


	27. Pieces of Solas

Sometimes, it helps to go back to the beginning.

 

1:

_At Haven, Solas could often be found hanging out in the tavern. It was called the Singing Maiden. Perhaps this is not what you'd expect, but it was true. Sene knew this about him, though it took her a while to work up the courage to approach him there. He liked to go during the day when it was quiet, empty, and the light came flooding through the windows to warm his quiet soul. That morning, she found him sitting on top of one of the tables with a book open in his lap. But he wasn’t reading. He had his eyes closed, and he was leaning back on the palms of his hands, facing the ceiling, his feet dangling off the floor. He was strange, aloof with her most of the time. But still. There was something about him. He was dreamy, very intense in the way he looked at her. He was not an elf like the other elves she knew, she had decided. He was a different kind of elf. He was unpredictable. He was tall._

_She hopped up on the table next to him, fearless, finally, her hair braided tightly against her head. He peaked at her, one eye open. “Sene,” he said._

_“Solas,” she said._

_He opened both of his eyes then, rubbed at them with the heels of his hands. It was a compulsion with Solas, she’d noticed. He did this all the time._

_“Don’t do that,” she said._

_“Why not?” he said._

_“It will make your eyeballs squeak.”_

_He stopped, sat up straight, smirked at her. “Squeaky eyeballs?” he said._

_“Yes,” she said._

_“Good to know.”_

_He closed the book. Set it aside._

_“What are you up to?” she said._

_“Why do you ask?”_

_“Were you in the Fade?”_

_Still smirking. “Perhaps.”_

_“Just tell me,” she said._

_“I don’t think so.”_

_“Why not?”_

_“Because you want to know,” he said, tilting his head toward her, “and if I told you, that would cut into my mystique.”_

_She rolled her eyes._

They were doomed to repeat this bit for the rest of their lives. It was a certainty.

2:

When Solas picked up his head from the table, Abelas had not moved. He watched, careful. He was perfectly aware in a way that unnerved Solas and yet, he was uncut in other ways that filled Solas with envy.

“Are you tired, Solas?” He was earnest.

Solas dug into his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I must leave,” he said.

“I appreciate your time,” said Abelas. “Thank you for coming to see me.”

Solas nodded and slid out from the booth.

“Solas,” said Abelas.

“Yes.”

“Know that I did not come here to interfere in your affairs,” he said. “Not with the Inquisition, and not with the Inquisitor. I merely—” he faltered, sighed, had to gather his words. “I just wanted to see you again. To see that it was truly you. Not some figment.”

Solas was weary. “This is hard for you,” he said. “I understand, Abelas. Know that the offer stands. _Garas su’_ _Tarasyl'an Te'las_. I will be there.”

“ _Enaste, Solas,_ ” said Abelas. “Skyhold. I am glad to know it still stands in some form. Though somehow, for the time being, I know that I must abstain. I cannot—go there. Not anymore.”

Solas nodded once, put a hand in his pocket, and dropped a pinch of silver coins on the table. “This is for the serving girl,” said Solas.

“You pay for your wine here?”

“She will not want to accept it,” said Solas, “but tell her that it is hers, no less. She has a daughter who is twelve years old, and the manager here pilfers her tips. I have asked him not to, personally, once before. But he cannot help himself. He is not well.”

Abelas studied the coins. “This is how the world works, still?” he said. “You offer a bit of coin to a pretty  _shem’len_ who does not want it?”

“She is not _shem’len,_ Abelas,” said Solas. “And we do not make her take it. We offer, and she will do with it whatever she sees fit. If she chooses to leave it on the table, then someone else will take it. And it will reenter the world regardless, under the pretenses of charity. There is no loss, only choice, exchange, and sometimes, a gift. _That_ is how this world works, Abelas. Do you understand?”

“I can remember this,” said Abelas, focused. He looked up at Solas, but Solas did not look at him. “It is familiar. If you ever want to talk again, Solas, you need only need to find me. After all these years, I hope that—all is not so lost anymore.”

“It is not,” said Solas. “Thank you, Abelas.”

 

3:

_When he wasn't at the tavern, Solas spent a lot of his time on rooftops. The strangest places. In Haven, these were small cottages, easy to scale, and he would lie down on his back and stare up at the great, green hole in the sky and parse his mind for meaning, connection. But he became bored easily in those days. He desired distractions, constantly. The mind is a tool that must be sharpened from all angles._

_She was the only one who knew how to find him. Somehow. She was very good at this. And one day, he was up on top of the roof of the apothecary, and he heard her down there, boots in the snow. He was on his back when she climbed up to meet him, and he sat up right away, rested his elbows on his knees. She was cautious, seemed worried. She sat cross legged beside him and without saying anything at all, held out her left hand for him to see. Right away, he knew what was wrong._

_It was sparking, only just. The anchor. Green energy coming off in little blips. He looked at her, asking permission. She nodded, and then he took her hand in both of his, studied._

_"I’m sorry to bother you,” she said, quiet. “It just started doing that this morning.”_

_“You are nervous,” he said. “Why?”_

_"I don’t know. I just want it to stop.”_

_He focused on her hand for a moment, matched the magic of the anchor with his own, and immediately, it calmed. The flickering, the sparks. All of it stopped. Now, her hand was just her hand._

_"What did you do?” she said._

_“Magic is like anything else, lethal’lan,” he said, still with her hand in his, examining—the knuckles, the wrist. “It must adapt.”_

_“What does that mean?”_

_“It is getting used to you,” he said, and he smiled. “It will calm down. Give it time.”_

_She exhaled, relieved. He gave her back her hand._

_Together, they looked up at the sky._

 

4:

Caer Bronach had a makeshift war table, in a small room with a great cask of mead and a window that looked outside to one of its many courtyards. Sene had changed out of her dress. She sat on the war table with her feet dangling off the floor, staring at her hand—the anchor. It was quiet, but still. She was bored, and it was there. Cullen was leaning in the doorway, reading, intently, from a very long piece of parchment. Every once in a while, he would furrow his brow and scribble something in the margins of the note with his quill. Then he would sigh and scrub at the back of his head with his free hand. Sene was beginning to memorize his patterns, his little compulsions. She studied him mercilessly that evening, intent, and when finally he felt her looking, he glanced up, peered around the room as if, in watching him so closely, she must have been mistaken.

“Is everything all right, Inquisitor?” he said.

“Yes,” she said, smiling. "I was just watching you read that note.”

He smiled, only by half, and then he shook his head. “You and Solas,” he said. “It’s like twelve maniacal oceans of focus between you. After all this time, I still sometimes find myself taken by surprise.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be so…focused.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “It was a compliment.”

“Thanks.”

“I do hope he’ll be here soon,” said Cullen. “This business in the tavern seems to be taking longer than expected. Are you concerned?”

“No,” she said. “If there was trouble, we'd know by now.”

“I suppose you’re right.”      

“How are you, Cullen?” she said, swinging her feet back and forth. “I have not asked you that in some time.”

He leaned with his back against the wall, watching her. “I am fine,” he said. “Very well, in fact. Thank you for asking.”

“Of course,” she said.

It was not long then before somebody knocked on the door. Cullen glanced to Sene.

But Sene had a bad feeling. She hopped down off the war table, tugged at the hem of her shirt. She nodded. Cullen opened the door. It was Charter.

“Charter,” said Cullen.

“Commander,” she said, nodding. “Your Worship.”

“What is it?” said Sene.

“I just wanted to inform you that Solas has returned from the village.”

“He has?” she said. “Where is he?”

“He was spotted out on the bridge,” said Charter. “Leading to the abandoned tavern on the lake. But he has not yet checked in at the gate. I thought you might want to know.”

Sene seemed surprised by this, looked away, thinking. Cullen looked at her, then at Charter, then back at Sene. “Thank you, Charter,” he said after a moment. “That will be all.”

"Very well, Commander.” She nodded at Sene one more time. “Your Worship.”

Cullen closed the door behind her. He set the parchment down on the war table and crossed his arms over his chest. He studied Sene now. Took note of her pensive, weary air. How she had changed since the beginning. So much. Her face could serve as a respite at the end of a very long day. But how he noticed her now, it was innocent. Mostly. He just knew that he did not like to see her uneasy. “Is everything all right?” he said.

She nodded, once, smiled up at him, a little strained. She hopped down off the table, tall for a woman. Almost as tall as he was, though not quite. “I’ll go see what’s going on,” she said.

“Take your time,” said the Commander. Clamped down and certain, a man of his code.

 

5:

_“You are younger than I thought you’d be,” said Solas, glancing at her. There they were again, side by side, rooftops._

_She glanced at him. “How old do you think I am?” she said._

_Her freckles full brown in the sun. He smiled. She was an open book. He liked this about her. He sifted easily through her years like paper pages. “Nineteen,” he said._

_“Very good.” She laughed, sort of impressed. Then she looked back at the sky._

_He watched her watch the Breach._

_“How old are you?” she said after a while._

_He smirked, shifting toward her. The sky was green, parts of it gray, parts of it blue. “That is privileged information, lethal’lan,” he said. “I do not give so easily.”_

_"And how does one earn the privilege of getting to know you, Solas?”_

_He was washed then. Some great big hand coming to take him away._

_"You’ll see,” he said, his words floating away like petals, being sucked into the hole in the sky._

_Lethal’lan. Like a gut shot._

 

6:

She found him standing alone, out on the bridge, just as Charter had said. He was staring out at the lake with his hands in his pockets. Tall, sound. The world was dark. Since closing the rift, they’d finally been able to restore the lake, and now it shivered and squirmed. It was beautiful, and the air was getting cool, and the moonlight was just many still beams.

“Solas?” she said. He glanced back, saw her there. She had changed out of her dress, and now she looked the same as always. Mild, tomboy. She had her hair tied back, low and loose at the base of her neck.

He smiled. He couldn’t help it. She was a red a wisp there on the bridge. Her hair coming loose on the breeze. “Hello, vhenan,” he said, looking back to the water. “I thought you might come.”

“What are you doing out here?” she said, soft. “We’ve been waiting for you. To come help us with the map.”

“I apologize,” he said. “I’ll see to Cullen as soon as I return.”

She was quiet.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“A great many things are wrong,” he said, and he turned around now, to face her. Still with his hands in his pockets, he stared at her, hard. “Don’t you think?”

She stood tall, her jaw firm. She was on her guard now. “Sure,” she said. “There are many things that need fixing.”

“I am one of them, no?”

She looked up at him, so wary, as if he might disappear or fly away. “Don’t say that.”

“Why not?”

“Come inside with me, Solas. We don’t have to talk out here.”

Solas took his hands out of his pockets, examined the knuckles, the palms. “I can’t go inside with you right now, Isene,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I can’t. To be with you, in the belfry. It would ruin me.”

“Ruin you?”

“I am a mess,” he said, looking up at her, shaking his head. His voice hardly anything at all now, hanging off the edge of a cliff. “I know you see it. Your sadness grows with each passing day. You’re waiting for me. You’re trying to protect me. I am so grateful, I—I have lost all understanding of who I’ve become.”

“Is that what you're doing out here? Avoiding me?"

"I'm not sure."

"Please tell me the truth."

“When I am not yours," he said. "Who am I?”

"What?"

"Answer the question."

“You are Solas," she said.

“And who is that?”

“I don’t know,” she said, heightened. “You won’t fucking tell me.”

“And that is the problem isn’t it?” he said. “We have hit an impasse.”

“Do you want me to push you, Solas? Do you want me to get angry? To give you an ultimatum?”

“No,” he said.

“Because I know that would make it easier for you,” she said. “Give you a way out.”

“That is not what I want.”

“Then what do you want, Solas?”

“I cannot go on like this, Isene,” he said abruptly, shaking his head, looking at the empty space between them. “I want to. I do, but that is the whole problem. I need to—I need to take a step back."

"Back?"

“I will not keep doing this to you.”

“You want to end things?” Her voice was small, like a dull, blue flame. She took a step forward. Then another step, then another. Her footsteps wet and muffled on the bridge. She was right there now, right in front of him. Frantic, flooding him from every angle. Making it impossible for him to breathe. She put her hands on his cheeks, these cold, perfect hands, but he wouldn’t lift his head. He could not meet her eyes. “Solas?” she said. “Look at me. Please. Don’t do this.”

“I love you, Sene,” he said, everything so heavy inside him. Like great piles of wet leaves. “I love you so much, it’s like an axe in my heart. I haven't loved like this in...a very long time.”

“Then why are you doing this?” she said, her voice breaking.

“Because,” he said. “I am confused. I need to figure out what to do next, and I need to do that without knowing that you'll be there when I inevitably fail.”

"That doesn't make any sense, Solas."

"Yes, it does, Isene. You make it so easy, just to _be._ And I cannot do that. Not now."

“Why didn’t you just do this before then?” she said. “In Val Royeaux? We were right there, Solas. You had your chance. To get it over with. But instead, you said things that made it seem—”

“I know what I said.” He looked at her now. “I wasn’t lying. I earnestly thought I could do it. Give you everything. But I can’t. Not now. It’s crushing me, Sene. I am not prepared.”

“Prepared for what?”

“Prepared to love you.”

“When will you be prepared?”

“I do not know.”

“When, Solas?”

“I don’t know, vhenan.”

“ _Vhenan_?” She changed then. There was a shift inside of her. He’d struck a match, and now she shoved him once, twice. He stumbled backward, but only just. This was not like the Arbor Wilds. It was not violent. It was like she wanted to snap him out of it. He did not try to stop her.

“How can you give up like this?” she said.

“I’m sorry, Sene,” he said.

“You're sorry?”

“It is not as simple as giving up.”

“Oh, right, I get it,” she said. She was crying now. Once again, he wanted to die. “Nothing is ever simple with you, Solas. You think I don’t know that by now? Like I’m just wandering around, some idiot. My glowing hand and red hair you like to pull when you fuck me. I’m not stupid. I know you. I know exactly what it takes to be with you. I’ve been holding your head in my hands for months. I'm not sorry for this. You’ve done everything for me, and I’d do anything for you. But instead of trusting me, you’re just going to what, run?”

“Run? Isene—”

She grabbed his face. She could feel him trying to move away, but he relented this time. There were tears on his cheeks. “You’re not a coward, Solas, but right now, you’re acting like a coward.”

“I _am_ a coward,” he said. “I am a coward.”

“No.”

“Yes. You’re lying to yourself to protect me. Don’t do that. It is not who you are.”

“Quit telling me who I am,” she said. “ _This_ is who I am.”

He took her wrists in his hands, felt their smallness. The hard bones, the soft skin. How he loved them. “ _Harthas su’em, Isene._ I love you, but I must do this alone.”

“Why?” she said.

“Because I have to figure out my purpose. I need to know who I am when you are not here to keep me together. Otherwise, I will never gain the strength to give you what you deserve. I have leaned on you for far too long. It is not right. It is _not right._ ”

“What purpose?" she said. "What are you talking about, Solas? And what about today? By the pool? You said—the dress. All of that, was it just words?”

“No,” he said. “It was not just words. It was all true. Everything I feel is true. It is real, Isene.”

“Let me fix it.”

“No.”

“Please, Solas.”

“I can’t. Not anymore.”

He took her hands into his. The feather bones of her knuckles, dragged them away. Set them down by her sides. He had to separate himself from her. He had to.

It was agonizing when she didn’t fight him after that. Unsettling. He'd thought she would, to the end. But instead, she had gone limp, quiet. A tall, paper tree, wilted and wet there on the bridge. He shook his head and dug his palms hard into his eyes, trying to work out the confusion. Like rocks, sockets filled with ashes. It hurt, but he couldn’t stop.

Until he felt her. “Don’t,” she said, tugging his hands away from his face. She did not linger. “Don’t do that.” He blinked hard, looking right at her, listened. Let his hands fall. She was dejected, but she still knew him. This person. What was he doing? She turned away.

“Isene,” he said. “Wait.”

“Stop.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Please, just stop, Solas. I can’t take it anymore.”

He listened.

“I have to go,” she said, shaking her head. “I have to go. Don’t follow me. Just come when you’re ready.” She wiped her eyes on the backs of her hands.

He watched her walk away from him then. She went quickly with her hands on top of her head the whole time, crying, looking up at the sky as if she were searching for something, something in a shape she recognized. But it was just a bunch of stars up there. Like somebody poking holes in the nothing, letting the light come through, but it was never enough. She needed the whole sky, he thought. Wide open. Cracked. Her familiar shape was getting smaller now, and then she disappeared completely from the bridge. She had not looked back once.

It was nothing he could have prepared himself for, to watch her walk away like that. This was not an image he had trained himself to understand. And once she was gone, it was like his whole heart, emptied. Cold, gutless, fucked. The pieces wet and solid on the wood of the bridge, thousands of them, and he fell to his knees to try and collect them into his hands. But they were all misshapen now. They kept slipping from his grasp. Solas.

 

7:

After Wisdom, he pitched into the distance, escaping so fast he very nearly got lost. He kept going until he wound up in the Emerald Graves. Bereft. Angled and unworthy. To what end? His first night, he ran into a batch of Red Templars who, through sheer force of willpower, he managed to turn violently against one another. He watched from inside of a high, safe tree as they tore each other limb from limb. Red glass and madness, dead eyes and a vague, short-lived feeling of peace. He found a cave, passed out, and slept in the Fade for twenty-four hours. While he was there, he was so fucking lonely, all he did was sit in the battlements of Skyhold and tempt the suspicions of demons. He was desperate for a fight, but none came. Almost as if they knew. Spirits emerged and called him Solas and this was a comfort, but these small pieces would not fit together in his mind anymore—even the ones in the shapes he recognized. It felt like living in an imprint. Everything was soft. Threads where he needed wires. Something to cut him straight through to the bone. Things had changed, somewhere along the line. He couldn’t place it. He didn’t know where he belonged.

When he awoke inside the cave, a bear had almost found its way to him. The smell was so ripe, the sounds so loud, he lost it, lulled the thing with his mind, and when it still tried to maul him, he sunk the blade of his staff deep into its tough, unbridled gullet. Terrible, but real. It slumped over, heavy, bleeding into the earth, and Solas grieved. Such brutish simplicities he had come to wreak since those mages in the Exalted Planes. He washed his hands in the river. He sat back on his heels and looked up into the sky and dug his palms hard into his eyeballs. _How do I unfuck this._ It was all he could think, and yet he hunted. Red Templars. He’d find them, do the same to them that he’d done to the others. Sometimes, he’d use his bare hands, or he’d set them on fire just to smell the burning cold of red lyrium. This went on for days. At first, catharsis. But then it made him delirious. Tired and like a fool. And so one day, when he stumbled upon two young Dalish hunters in the woods who had set their aim on him, he just held up his hands and dropped to his knees and prepared to die. But they lowered their guard. He was messed up, they thought. He had no vallaslin. “An apostate elf,” said the first, stowing his bow over his back. “I have heard of this man. The appearance fits.” Then the Dalish hunter held out his hand. “You are with the Inquisition?”

Solas was surprised. It was like being clipped in the jaw, hard with the butt of an axe. He took the man’s hand, disoriented, got to his feet and dusted the furs of his armors and stared hard at the two Dalish hunters, both of them in the vallaslin of Andruil. Young, clearly brothers. “I am,” he said.

“Where are you headed, soldier?” said the first.

“To Skyhold,” said Solas, on impulse. “I became separated from my party in the Exalted Planes.”

“We, too, are headed north,” said the second. “We can escort you.”

“Escort me?” said Solas.

“Yes.” They spoke in these fierce Fereldan accents, reminding him of Sera. “It’s dangerous terrain out here,” said the first. “You already look like you could use a reprieve.”

Solas traveled with the Dalish hunters for eight days, sleeping in old tents by the sides of old rivers. Their names were Lahlas and Datishan— _hope, respite_. The coincidence was not lost on him. Solas spoke very little to either of them, but he did learn that they hailed from the Hinterlands, and that they were on some sort of self-imposed pilgrimage through Orlais. Their clan was friendly with humans, traded with them regularly in Redcliffe Village. This astounded Solas. He found himself desperately intrigued by their strange, feral lives.

One night, early on, Lahlas, the younger one with very harsh blue eyes, finally asked him about the Inquisitor.

“Do the humans respect her?” he wanted to know, pulling a whetstone down the length of a hunting knife.

“Yes,” said Solas. “She is commanding, especially given her age.” Solas was restitching a hole in his armor, struggling a bit. It was hard getting pins through leather.

“She is young?” said Datishan.

“Quite,” said Solas. “But she is not a child.”

“What is her _sal’melin_?” said Lahlas. “Or, do you speak the language?”

Solas smiled. “ _Vin, lethal’lin_ ,” he said. “ _Ara dirthan_ _vi'dirth'el'vhen'an_. Her name is Sene.”

“Sene?” said Lahlas. “I have never heard _Sene_.”

Solas thought on it. He’d never heard the name either. “Perhaps it is unique,” he said, “to her.”

In this moment, Solas came to a realization.

Since traveling with the Dalish brothers, for better or for worse, Solas finally felt some semblance of stasis. It had been a very long time. The bone-grinding process of their day to day: finding dry land to camp on, fresh water to drink, building tents, building fires, turning animals into meat, carving arrows out of branches, fletching feathers to the ends. Blood on their hands and in their fingernails. It was a calming process, their quotidian. Almost mesmerizing. Solas felt deeply cleansed by the experience. He was tired and dirty. He hardly used magic at all but for simple tasks, like keeping the fire going at night. At some point, he lost his gloves and had to stitch together a spare from pieces of hide skinned from a large rabbit. The Dalish brothers were so impressed by this, they asked him to make them each a pair as well. They appreciated his mastery of such small, simple deeds, and he appreciated theirs. They worked together, and this kind of work, being outdoors, with people, sweating in the sun, frozen in the nights, it was a good feeling, and he fell asleep exhausted at the end of each day, wiped of his anxieties, his loneliness sated. A revelation.

And with his mind scraped clean, he found himself thinking of Sene. Dalish girl and red apple. So real. Just like this. He needed to understand all of a sudden. Sene’s methods, how she knew how to deal with him. She’d let him get right up close, and then, she would do something strange. All their little exchanges, the rooftops of Haven, steps and tables and chairs. Carving out their weird, funny place in the world, little by little, piece by piece. She made him laugh. He had always liked her. She was pretty, a whip. She was like a little window.

But after Haven, when they got to Skyhold, things changed between them. They got bigger, much faster. So much had happened, and their closeness: multiplied. She was wiped out and scared of the anchor and very young for her mantle, but she was also brave and terribly open to him, giving in ways that felt whole, real. She made him curious, and he suddenly found himself with her, constantly. Sitting in the rotunda. Sometimes in the garden. She would come to him, full of questions, full of fear, but eager for resolution, in total understanding of what it was that she wanted. These anxieties over the anchor, and the trauma of Haven, it had left a scar in her. Somewhere deep. But she was no less hopeful, and he had a way of softening things and yet somehow making them more concrete. He gave her knowledge, which she craved, a stable foundation to stand on, and he taught her to understand the magic of the anchor, how it was _hers,_ and not the other way around.

They became sheltered, fast animals. She liked his magic, and he was drawn to her, too, because she was so bright, so forward, and she did not play games. If she wanted to put her head on his shoulder, she did. If she wanted to hold his hand, she did. She was simple that way, easy to figure out, and yet, she was always vibrating, wanting something, and it was this that undid him the most. He tried to teach her patience and yet, part of him wanted to meet her essential impatience head-on with his own, and so one night, she fell asleep beside him on the sofa in the rotunda, and he took her to the Fade. She kissed him. The entire moment had been impulsive, but true. A piece of her red hair had come undone from her braids, and it was getting lost in the Fade wind, and she was so beautiful. Like a little spike there, sticking him good, and he lost his heart and kissed her back. Finally. It felt right. Like this was exactly what was supposed to happen.

And now, he knew. Kissing her in the Fade, it was like a warm, red pebble in his mouth. Hard, sweet. He could not forget it, get the taste out, the touch. When he thought about Sene, he no longer thought about Wisdom, or sadness, destruction, or what the world had been like before. He just wanted her. The voice, the stories, the laughter. The skin, the eyes, the freckles, and that piece of hair gone to the wind. Everything.

Those cold nights with the Dalish brothers, camped in the outskirts of existence, Solas would dream of her, nonstop. Earthshattering. Wake up alone in his tent, over the edge and have to catch himself hard against reality. It was strong. It took him by surprise, grabbed him by the insides and twisted, gutting him whole. He had been dormant for a while, guarded from his own existence, but now, it seemed, he was out of breath, and he was awake. So awake.

Two Dalish men hunting in these woods, sharing their camp with Fen’Harel. None would have thought it possible, and yet, there they were. And Fen’Harel just a man, his dreams unstuck by a woman, a red-haired girl who’d plucked him sharp. This was the stuff of legend. And the truth was, the Dread Wolf took no one. He, himself, had been taken, and the elves who did it, these children of a history they did not understand, it turned out they were not children at all. They were real, and they did not forsake him. They trusted him, accepted him, equals, as Solas, and he _was_ Solas now, again, and this hit him harder than anything. He did not want to leave this place.

He bid farewell to the Dalish brothers somewhere east of the Emprise du Lion. He invited them to come back to Skyhold, meet the Inquisitor. But they were on their way to the Waking Sea. “You may find our clan in the Hinterlands,” they said. “Near Redcliffe. Any time. We will be back there inside a month.” Solas, grateful, thanked them for their mercy and their help. Then the men parted, as men. Nothing more and nothing less.

When he finally made it back to Skyhold a day later, Solas found her in the Herald’s Rest with Sera, eating cookies the two of them had baked from scratch. He’d never seen her eat a cookie before. When she saw him from across the room, she approached with caution, but it was like red hot energy, lightning coming off her in every direction. She wore green, her hair braided loosely to her head. She was relieved to see him, but she was also trusting. She asked very few questions. She wanted to make sure that he was okay. So they took a walk together, and they talked about the things he had missed while he was gone, like cookies and Sera and pulling pranks in the garden, and in a moment of intense privacy, somewhere outside the Chantry when they were sure no one was looking, they kissed.

He felt such relief, and then she had to go. She had things to do of course. And it was daytime, and with the sun hard and high in the sky, it was easy to walk away and to say _I’ll see you soon, vhenan._

In the teavern that night, as the sun went down, six cards in his hand, Solas tilted his head toward Blackwall.

“Your call,” he said.

"I raise,” said the Warden.

And Solas smirked.

The Warden. The apostate.

We’ve talked about recklessness. But in all truth, for Solas, going to her that night did not feel reckless. It felt entirely earned, pure. He didn’t know what to expect, not truly. He just went to be with her, in any capacity. But she asked him to make love to her, and he did, because it was where the moment had taken them, no matter the cost, and yes, he wanted to, and she wanted him as well, and he could not remember the last time he had done anything simply because of _want_. No pretenses or expectations. Nothing but hearts and hands and Sene’s red hair. And like the boy that he was, he lost himself. She had given him the freedom to do so, and for this, he came to worship her.

 

8:

_The day that Sene and her army of mages managed to close the Breach, everything was strange. The air, wonders. Crackling. She was tired as Haven rejoiced. The two of them sat together on the steps of the Chantry. They listened, watched. Cassandra and Varric and Dorian, they were over there, laughing as the sun went down._

_Sene asked Solas, “When you have a headache, can you just cure it with your magic?”_

_He laughed at this. “No, lethal’lan. When I get headaches, I’m just like you.”_

_“You’re not like me at all.”_

_“Oh?”_

_“I’m just tripping, Solas,” she said. “Over and over. I keep looking up, but then I trip again. I get lucky. But I have you, too. You always know what to do. Without you, I’d be dead.”_

_She was serious, but the way she said it, off-hand, it was like a joke. Armor. “You are doing very well, Sene,” he said. “And make no mistake. I do not always know what to do.”_

_“Give me your hands,” she said abruptly._

_He gave her a look. “Why?”_

_“I just want to see them. You get to play with my hands all the time.”_

_"Your hand,” he said. “And I’m not playing. I’m studying.”_

_“Well, then let me study your hands, Solas. Please?”_

_He sighed, gave them over. “I’m very picky about this sort of thing, Sene,” he said. “You should consider yourself lucky.”_

_She ignored him, inspecting his hands one at a time, front and back, high and close to her face. “Hmm,” she said._

_“What do you see?”_

_“Your hands are rough for a mage,” she said. “That’s what I see. What do you do with them to make them so rough?”_

_He laughed at this. “You would really like to know, wouldn’t you?”_

_"I want to know everything,” she said, giving them back and tucking her warm head into his shoulder. So fast. She’d never done this before. Her hair up and braided, but it was a massive instrument. He could tell. He wondered, now, at its true nature. Next to her, he was a nervous animal. He was not used to this. It could undo him, if he let it._

_“That may take some time, Sene,” he said. And there he went. He was letting it. Only just, but still. It was only a matter of time. He pressed his nose to her hair, breathed. “Everything is a long way to go.”_

_“I can wait,” she said._

 

It really had been a season of love.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Acknowledgement:
> 
> Thank you, Fairymelt for the prompt on tumblr that led to that very first scene, which served as inspiration to these flashbacks in general. I could not have conceived this chapter without you. <3
> 
>  
> 
> Elven Translations:
> 
> "Enaste, Solas." - A very religious form of "Thank you."
> 
> "Garas su’Tarasyl'an Te'las." - "Come to Skyhold."
> 
> “Harthas su’em, Isene. - "Listen to me, Isene."
> 
> “Vin, lethal’lin,” he said. “Ara dirthan vi'dirth'el'vhen'an." - "Yes, friend," he said. "I speak the language of the people."


	28. The Art of Escape

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Sene takes off after the fight on the bridge, the men in her life swirl into a flurry of concern over how to get her back. 
> 
> Except for one in particular, who is content to aid her in her quest for escape.

It was not long then. On the bridge, the spirit child approached. He had sensed a sadness here, far away from the humans and drawn to the diaphanous Veil parts of the water. He did not know it would be Solas, but when he found Solas there, he was not surprised.

Solas sensed Compassion almost immediately. Heart-shaped boy. He felt his breath catch in his chest, looked up. “Cole?” he said.

“Your heart is showing, Solas,” Cole said, approaching. He knelt down to place his dry hand on the sad elf’s wide back. “Like very cold fish. You should ask Sene to help you put the pieces back together. She could fletch you, like one of her arrows.”

“I cannot do that,” said Solas from his knees. He leaned forward on his palms, shook his head. “I can’t.”

“You were happy,” said Cole, patting him on the shoulder. “Tangled barbed wire, but happy. Every time you bled, it was for her. You understood that it was better than before. When the bleeding was for others who followed. You were always wondering. Was it love they gave? Hands, empty faces. But you know now that it was not. All new, faded for her. The storm went away with its hollow eyes. Then, you were alone. But she is real. And they are real. Sene is not here for the wolf, Solas.”

“I cannot escape it,” said Solas. “What I’ve done. I—forgot. I tried.”

“You only did it because you thought it was right,” said Cole. “You did not mean for anyone to get hurt, Solas. You know now the song is changing. You should forgive yourself.”

“Forgive?”

“You want her. Sene wearing a dress. Sene standing in the kitchen, holding a small, green plant in the yellow sun. That is what you want. But you let sorrow win. Why?”

Solas stood up then. Somehow. He found his bearings and he put the heel of his hand into his eye again as if nothing had ever happened. Nothing changed. “Abelas did not win, Cole,” he said. He was getting a headache. Confused.

“I did not mean Abelas,” said Cole.

 

Sene went back to Caer Bronach that night, but she did not enter through the gate. A whole bunch of months before, the first time they were here, in Crestwood, right after they'd closed the rift under the lake, she and Solas had discovered another way inside—a cave in the side of a hill, right up against the shore of the Waking Sea. There were these great, steel bars built into the mouth of the cave, like jail bars, and the great, barred door was locked, but Sene was good with locks. So was Solas. He just never told anyone. They cleared it of spiders, easy, and then they cleaned the place up because Solas demanded, and then they sexed against the bars, but it wasn’t like some people would think. Steel bars and sex. It was just more deep and wet and solid undoing, gentle until it was not, and then they wandered deeper inside the cave, climbed a ladder, and fell asleep on a mat beside a desk and a chair that no one seemed to be using anymore. And after that, like the belfry and like Skyhold and like the great big stupid world, that little cave place was theirs.

The thing about being Inquisitor, thought Sene, and especially being so _young_ as Inquisitor, and so pretty and so odd like a red paper crane, people tended to forget about the thing you’d been before. They looked at you now—backwater Dalish child turned shiny seed, tall elf girl in a dress, hair like fire on the Waking Sea at sunset. They curtsied. They bowed. They made plans and told stupid stories about warriors and dragons, and bards sang songs. _Inquisitor. My Lady. Your Worship._ They sent you to big, silver parties where you pranced around like some idiot, and you wore a green dress to match your green hand, and it was expensive and heavy, but he liked it, so you sort of liked it, too, but mostly, you both just liked it because of what it felt like when he got inside it, and all of it happened so fast, so incredibly real and without borders, but it was such a fucked-up time, that through all of this, they all just forgot. They just forgot why it was you’d been sent to the Temple of Sacred Ashes in the first place.

Because you were fast. And you were bright, and agile, and brave. And you were the greatest huntress your clan had ever raised, and when you, Sene Lavellan, wanted to avoid being seen, you avoided being seen.

Sene snuck into the fortress, through the cave. _Their_ cave. It was easy getting to the top of the belfry, too. The entire tower was secluded and very dark, and everyone knew that the belfry was _her_ belfry, and so they stayed away. Her armor was gold and shadow. Her bow, a long, weathered arm she loved. She braided her hair, closed the door behind her, and then, she was gone. In and out. A red wind. No one saw her. And somehow, she knew that it was stupid, and she knew that it was wrong, but all at once, she could not care. She was embarrassed and tired, and her face was bare, and if she showed herself, she knew that she would have to explain it. Every time. One hundred times. Solas at the pool. And why. And how. And this was agony. Because it made her think of quiet moments, like the pool and the cave and the belfry, and how much she loved him, and how this used to be their thing—quiet moments. Until the bridge. And now, like some kind of weird, bad rock inside, the love sank. It was mean and heavy. It would not relent, and the thought of having to face all this bullshit without him, with just this hard, sinking death in her gut, she would do nothing but cry and tip over into the weeds of existence, and that was not who she wanted to be.

Sene did not wallow. Sene had never once wallowed in her entire life. She was not going to start now. So she went away into the purple night of paradise, Crestwood, and she disappeared into the lovely terrain, and she tried as hard as she could, for once, to be free. Even if only for a little while.

 

Solas checked in at the gate, alone. He was met with whispers. In the makeshift war room, he and Cullen toiled over the map to the place in Morrigan’s note for a good hour before Cullen finally thought to look up and wonder at the whereabouts of the Inquisitor. It had been wistful and off-hand, and Solas looked and felt like shit, and thought of the belfry, and blue bedsheets, and all of the reasons why he could not tell the truth, and he suddenly found himself half-keeled over with his hands on the war table, head hanging, nausea, and some strange combination of guilt and anger wound up in his stomach like a ball of thorns. And he thought about kicking it around some and trying to get it out, but without her, it was no use. The thing on the bridge had happened, and she was not there to help him fix it this time. He’d gotten what he wanted. But without her, everything was hard and boring and gray.

“Are you all right, Solas?” said Cullen. He’d changed out of his armors, finally. His shirt was a whisper blue and his slacks a heavy black. He’d taken a coin out of his pocket and studied its small, dull surface.

Solas nodded, watched him, pushed off the table and stood up. The room was small. Brick walls. No window. He was thirsty, tired. He wanted to go home, but he was no longer entirely sure what that meant. “What is that?” said Solas, nodding to the coin.

“Oh, this,” said Cullen. He held it out to Solas, giving permission. Solas took the small, hard piece between his fingers. “My brother gave it to me the day I left for Templar training. Said it was good luck.”

Solas liked the way it felt. Smooth, simple. He gave it back and said, “How has that been working out for you so far?”

Cullen scoffed. “I’m not sure yet,” he said. “I’m still holding out, to be honest.”

Solas swallowed, his throat dry. He put his hands in his pockets. “That took a great deal of courage, what you did,” he said. “Quitting the lyrium. You should be proud.”

Cullen held the coin tightly in his fist, smiled. Then he met Solas head-on, eye to eye. “Thank you, Solas. That means a great deal, you know. Coming from you.”

“Coming from me? Why?”

“Because,” he said. “If it weren’t for Sene, I never would have—ah. Nevermind. You don’t need to be told of the Inquisitor’s kindness. Or her patience. You’ve experienced it yourself, I’m sure. In one way or another, by now.”

Solas watched him, strangely admiring. The courage to speak so freely. “Yes,” he said, glancing down then, scuffing his foot across the floor, the hard thing welling in his chest. “You have no idea.”

Then, somebody knocked. It was frantic, loud.

“Who is it?” said Cullen, slightly irritated, putting the coin back in his pocket.

“It is Charter, sir. I have a matter of some urgency to discuss with you.”

Cullen nodded at Solas who opened the door.

The tall elf stood there, oddly disheveled. Her brow, furrowed hard.

“Report,” said Cullen. “What’s going on?”

She stepped inside, closed the door. “It’s the Inquisitor, sir,” she said, glancing at Solas, but only just. She could not seem to meet him in the eye.

Solas took his hands out of his pockets, braced himself. “What about her?” he said.

“She is—she is missing, sir.”

“ _Missing?_ ” said Cullen. He puffed up, got big.

Solas felt something drop inside him. A knife, a sword. Something bad. His throat closed, tight.

“Yes, sir,” she said, hands wound tightly behind her back. “When Solas checked in at the gate, she had not. This was a red flag, obviously.” She looked at Solas, sidelong, concerned. “I sent agents to the belfry. I had them search the entire castle, courtyards to kitchens. Every last broom closet, every room. The Inquisitor is not inside the fortress.”

“She never came back?” said Solas.

Charter shook her head. “Some of her things are missing,” she said. “Armor, bow, quiver. She was here. She just—she got past us. In and out. Somehow. I estimate she’s been gone a little over an hour. There are several secret entrances to the fortress. She must have used one of them. I am not sure how to proceed.”

Cullen had one hand on his hip, his mouth open. He hunched, stared off, nowhere. His mind searching. Solas turned around to lean into the war table again, buckled in disbelief. Charter watched them, both of them, these two men coming quickly undone, then winding back up tight. The whole room pressurized. Confused. She stayed calm, nonetheless, as she’d been trained to do. She arched her back, raised her chin. This was bullshit, frankly. She thought hard about Leliana and how the reaction would have differed. Lady Nightingale would have rolled her eyes, spat and swore and gave orders. But these men, somehow. They were losing it.

“You are absolutely sure about this,” said Cullen.

“I am sure,” she said. “My men are thorough. I would not have reported to you otherwise.”

“Who else knows?” said Solas, still keeled over the table, leaning on his elbows now, eyes closed. “Other than the three of us, who?”

“Only my sixteen agents on duty, sir. They can be trusted.”

“Thank you, Charter,” said Cullen, head in his hand. “We will need to deliberate on the matter. Stand by on the battlements. Assign your agents to their regular posts and tell no one of this. Keep me informed of any developments.”

She nodded. “Yes, sir.” She turned on her heels and left without a word.    

The air was stale. The whole room like a dry, hard core at the center of existence.

“Solas,” said Cullen.

Solas massaged his temples, shook his head. His headache, getting worse now. “Sene,” he said to himself.

“Solas?” said Cullen, more forcefully this time. "Explain this. Please."

“I should have known,” he said. “After the bridge. This—this is not entirely unlike her. I should have known.”

“Not unlike her?” said Cullen. “She’s never done anything like this before.”

“Not here,” said Solas. “Not since we’ve known her.”

“Before that?”

Solas straightened up, turned to the Commander, jaw firm. “Sene is twenty years old. A Dalish huntress who grew up in a clan that both stifled and asked a great deal of her. As a result, she has classically trained herself in the art of escape.”

“Escape?” said Cullen.

“Yes, escape.”

“What happened with the two of you?” said Cullen, crossing his arms over his chest. “Out on that bridge.”

Solas blinked, sized him up. “That is personal,” he said.

“I understand that,” said Cullen, “but your personal life seems to have put the Inquisitor on the run and possibly in danger. Anything you can tell me that might give us a clue as to where she went—”

“You don’t think I’d tell you if I knew something?” said Solas. “I may not be in my right mind tonight, but I understand Sene, Commander, and I know this instinct all too well. She may be rash, but she is not stupid. Nothing I can tell you will better our ability to predict where she’ll turn up.”

“So, she’s just lost, is that it?” said Cullen, strange and angry. “We should just resign to the fact that the leader of the most powerful religious organization in all Thedas, a profoundly recognizable walking target with a bright red head, is beyond our grasp and may never return?”

“No,” said Solas. “Of course that is not what we should do.”

“Then shall I round up search parties?” said Cullen. “Send 100 aimless, clanking men into the terrain? Create a public relations nightmare for Josephine when the good people of Crestwood inevitably find out that we’ve _lost_ the Inquisitor?”

“That would also not be advisable.”

“Perhaps you missed the part where I was being sarcastic.”

“I did not. Though your sarcasm is unproductive, Commander, at best.”

“Your own suggestions are welcome at any time, Solas.”

“I am thinking.”

There was another knock then, on the door.

“Maker be,” said Cullen. “What now?”

Solas reached out of pure instinct, pulled the door open with no hesitation. Bull and Dorian were both there, in full armor. It seemed they’d never undressed after the affair in the village. They edged inside, looking hard and suspicious, and Dorian gently shut the door behind them.

“You two,” said Cullen, immediately. “What have you heard?”

“Kind of an aggressive greeting, Commander,” said Bull. “Don’t you think?”

“We haven’t heard anything,” said Dorian.

“Then what are you doing here?”

“We ran into Charter on the battlements,” said Bull. “She was acting kind of weird, and then we could hear the two of you yelling all the way down the hallway. What the fuck is going on?”

Cullen glanced at Solas. Solas nodded.

“Sene is gone,” said Cullen.

“What?” said Dorian. He looked at Solas, innocent. “Where did she go?”

Solas was deeply self-aware at this point, half-resigned to this situation already. “I do not know.”

“What happened?” said Dorian.

“We fought,” said Solas, out of nowhere, “out on the bridge. She left. I thought she was coming back here. Obviously, I was mistaken.”

“What kind of fight,” said Bull.

“Now is not the time,” said Solas.

“Come on, Solas,” said Bull. “I’ve seen the two of you fight. Last time, things got pretty ugly, pretty fast. Is that what we’re dealing with here? The boss when she’s angry?”

“What, exactly, is he talking about?” said Cullen.

“This is not the Arbor Wilds,” said Solas. “She was not angry when she left me.”

“Are you sure.”

“Yes.”

“What was she then?” said Dorian.

Solas shook his head, looking at the floor. He couldn’t say it. Wouldn’t.

“Solas?”

“I’d like to know that myself,” said Cullen.

“She was upset,” said Solas. “She was just—upset.”

“Upset?” said Dorian.

“Yes. Upset.”

“Sene is impulsive,” said Dorian, fixated. “She does not always think things through. I will give you that, Solas. But she must have been pretty _upset_ to run like this. What did you say to her?”

Solas almost laughed. He was ragged. “Please, Dorian. Save you chivalry. This is not a particularly proud moment for me.”

“Clearly.”

Cullen cleared his throat. “None of this is at all productive. Perhaps—”

“I can track her,” said Solas now, his patience wearing thin. “I can track Sene.”

“Track her?” said Cullen. “How?”

“I can read her energy,” said Solas, searching his mind. “I know her imprint by heart. I don’t know where she’s going, but I can usually tell where she’s been.”

“Her imprint?” said Cullen.

“On the Veil,” said Dorian. “Or, I assume as much.”

“Essentially,” said Solas, “Yes, that is what I mean.”

“Could that actually work?” said Cullen.

“If I can get a hold of it,” said Solas, “and if she doesn’t get too far.”

Cullen shifted. Somehow, the whole room seemed to sigh. “Very well,” he said. “I’ll round up a detail. You’ll leave immediately.”

“What?” said Solas. “No. You said it yourself. Your _detail_ will be heard stomping through the woods from a mile away. We’re not tracking a druffalo.”

“Then I’ll order Charter to send scouts,” said Cullen. “Nice and quiet.”

“Again, no.”

“Certainly you don’t think you’re going alone.”

“I am going alone,” said Solas.

“I won’t allow it.”

“With all due respect, Commander,” said Solas. “I invite you to try and stop me.”

“Hey,” said Bull. “Hey, hey. Guys. Maybe we could all just put our dicks away for the time being and cooperate.”

“And lower your voices, won’t you?” said Dorian. “Unless we want the entire castle to know what’s going on here.”

“Solas,” said Cullen, quiet but stern, leaning toward him. It was like a private moment between them. “Listen to me.”

“Fine.”

“After our success in Val Royeaux, you have become celebrity,” said Cullen, “a high profile target just like Sene. This is not to mention the fact that you are a friend to many here and an indispensable asset to the Inquisition. You invite me to try and stop you, that is your right, but I must ask you now to withdraw said invitation from the table, because believe me when I say that I will have no choice but to accept, even if it’s just to cover my own ass. Because if I let you go alone, and something should happen to you, Sene might literally kill me. So, you see, Solas, I cannot and will not let you do this.”

Solas sighed, staring at the Commander, his resolve shifting, weakening. He shoved his hands in his pockets. “That is—I will be fine, Commander,” he said, shaking his head. “Please, trust me.”

“I do trust you, Solas. But it is my job to protect you. Let me do my job.”

Solas squeezed his eyes shut, resigned. “Fair enough.”

“We’ll go,” said Bull. “Keep the numbers small, stay hidden.”

“Absolutely,” said Dorian. “I might be able to help anyway. With the Veil, that is. I don’t know Sene’s energies as well as you do, Solas, but I do know them. Two heads are better than one, in any case. Even if one is, well, _yours_.”

“Fine,” said Solas. “Fine. I just need to—get ready.”

“I’ll stay here to manage the situation,” said Cullen.

“Where is Sera?” said Solas, abruptly, his hand on the door, glancing from Bull to Dorian, back to Bull, back to Dorian. “Does she know what’s going on?”

“I don’t think so,” said Dorian, scratching his head. “When we left her, she was on her way to bed. Anyway, I imagine that if she did know, she’d be here already. Shouting.”

“Good,” said Solas. “I can’t—I cannot deal with this _and_ her right now. She’d be angry with me. She’d ask too many questions. I need her in the dark until this is resolved.”

Cullen was curious. “Very well,” he said. “I’ll see that she’s…kept in the dark.”

“Thank you,” said Solas. “Thank you.”

Bull approached then, put his wide hand on the tall elf’s shoulder. He was concerned. "Hey, Solas," he said. “ I"m not trying to pry, but is everything okay?”

Solas felt fractured again. The pieces of his heart all beating in their separate, fucked-up rhythms. “I don’t know,” he said to Bull, opening the door, shaking his head, yet again. To be honest, he could hardly breathe. “I truly don’t know.”

 

She traveled southeast until she reached a series of high, stark cliffs. Crestwood was a strange place. Traveling here, you had to use ledges and do a lot of climbing to get around the main roads. No forests to claim her. Still, she got as far as the Black Fens before finding herself distracted.

There were bandits out that night, conducting business at some sort of underground market place on the coast. She passed overhead, on the ledges high above, interested, could see their little lanterns down there, their carts and kiosks. She had no clue what they were selling, but she earnestly didn't care. She found a good place to stop and sit and just watched them. Legs dangling over the edge of a steep cliff, and she leaned and tried not to think of Solas, the cold pieces of his heart that she no longer understood. She loved him, and she hated him. There was no better way to put it, but mostly she loved him. The loving him part felt good and patient. It was like a warm light. But then the other part would creep up like tar and fill her insides with the dread that she may have, on no uncertain terms, just lost him forever on a bridge in Crestwood, and the idea of living without him as a quiet fixture in her life took hold, and her throat tightened, and again, she wanted to cry.

She watched the bustle of the bandits, their stupid nightly quotidian as if it mattered, and yet somehow, in this moment, she wished to be one of them, living out here, a nobody on the edge of morality so that when death came, swift, she could meet it, deserved. These enemies never seemed scared of dying, she thought. They were all of them a great big conundrum, and she wondered at their lives and whether they had mothers or lovers or children, and suddenly the entire prospect of being Inquisitor, handing down judgments from her place as a child on a high, arched throne, made her wary and nauseous, and she longed for the days when the only bullshit she had to worry about were the boys in her clan making fun of her hair, or her Keeper looking down his nose, or her mother in the corner of the cellar, painting pictures on a low, steel beam. Her father was a ghost in her memory now. She hardly recognized him. Stupid, stoic man, just following after his bullshit till the day he died. All of them in their blood writing.

She wondered if they missed her, all the way in the backwater passages outside of Ansburg, in their farm country. Because very suddenly, out of nowhere, she missed them. It was terrible.

As she sat their watching the bandits below, she thought she smelled something. Out of nowhere. It was familiar. She looked up, and drifting off the ledge overhead was a long catch of white smoke. Elfroot. She got up, suspicious, and waited to see if something happened. Down below, one of the bandits laughed and shoved another, and a fight broke out. She found a good surface and began the process of scaling up the side of the cliff. It wasn’t too far, or too difficult. The rock formations of Crestwood were healthy and solid, and at some point, she managed to get to the top of a tenuous walkway and followed it around until it took her to the very top. She caught her breath, dusted herself off, straightened the bow on her back and looked around. There was a cave and a mighty tree. Out on the ledge, sitting on a hollowed out tree trunk behind a small camp fire, she saw a person—a man. He was the one smoking the elfroot, leaning back on one of his palms and looking out at the wide and moonlit sea. She stood for a moment, unsure if she should approach.

But then, the man spoke. “I know you’re back there,” he said. “Inquisitor Lavellan.”

She recognized the voice, but it had come as a surprise. She almost didn’t believe it at first. “Abelas?” she said.

“Very good,” he said. “It is, indeed, me.”

She approached, hesitant but curious. “What are you doing here?” she said once she got to the ledge.

He glanced up at her, a joint of elfroot pressed between his fingers. He had his hood back, long hair tucked into a low ponytail at the base of his neck. “I am…escaping,” he said. “If you must know, _dhula or’avise_. I sensed you down on that ledge some time ago. Now that you’re here, you are free to join me, if you so desire.”

She climbed onto the tree trunk, facing the opposite direction. “ _Dhula or’avise?_ ” she said. “ _Rogasha, Abelas._ Especially considering your attitude when I saw you last. Sure you don’t want to send me away? Call me a _shem’len_?”

He held out the joint to her, shook his head, smoke trailing from his lips. “ _Ir’abelas_ , Inquisitor. I am learning. About you most of all. I do not believe I treated you with the proper respect at the Temple. I regret this.” 

“You do?”

“Yes, a great deal.”

She swung her feet over the tree trunk. She was sitting beside him now. She took the joint, studied it, smelled the smoke.

“Have you ever smoked _feladara,_ Inquisitor?” he said.

“Not since before,” she said.

“Not since before what, Inquisitor?”

She did not hesitate now, surprised herself. What did it matter? She took a long, slow drag. Soft, floating. She felt like pale, dawn-covered feathers after that. “Corypheus,” she said.

“I see.” He watched her exhale.

She just passed it back.

“It was not an uncommon remedy in my time,” said Abelas. “Of course, this is different. Though I am different as well. So the effect is much the same.”

Abelas smoked. Together, they looked out at the swell of the Waking Sea.

“Can I ask you a question?” said Abelas after a little while.

“Fine," she said.

Hands exchanged. She breathed in the smoke, flicked the ash, became self-conscious. She thought it strange for a moment, sharing elfroot with a man she hardly knew. And yet, somehow.

She passed it back

“Are you escaping, too, Inquisitor?” he said.

“Yes."

“I figured as much,” he said. She listened as he exhaled, settling. “You can tell me the truth, you know. It's not like I've anyone to tell.”

“I wish you wouldn’t call me Inquisitor,” she said.

He glanced at her. “What shall I call you?”

“You can call me Sene.”

“Sene,” said Abelas, shifting toward her, the joint between his lips. He looked up, met her eyes. She could see the pale vallaslin in the light from the fire. “Very well.”

“Thank you.”

“Is that your real name?” he said, inhaling, then releasing the smoke bit by bit. “Sene.”

“No,” she said. “My _sal’melin_ is Isene.”

“Ah, yes,” he said, looking back at the fire. “Right. I have heard tales of your name, _lethal’lan_. Isene. _Like fire._ ”

Sene wasn’t surprised by this. “If you already know my name,” she said. “Why not just say so? Why call me Inquisitor.”

“It is your mantle,” he said. “It is only proper.” He passed the joint.

“Yes, well,” said Sene, taking her turn. “I am growing tired of proper, to be honest.”

“I see you are without your vallaslin,” said Abelas.

She faltered, looked away.

“I have not seen that spell performed in a long, long time, _lethal’lan_.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “What do you know about it?”

“Far more than I have time to share. Perhaps some day.”

She rolled her eyes, passed it back. The joint was burning off now, almost dead.

“I believe I know the man who removed it for you,” he went on.

She looked at him. “What?”

“He calls himself Solas. Am I wrong.”

“You know Solas?”

“I know he was at the Temple with you,” said Abelas, tossing the dead joint into the weeds, “and I knew him before that.”

“You did?”

He was feeling around for something on the ground at his feet now. “Our journeys in the Fade. Of course," he said, producing a small, wooden box from the weeds. On it were painted all of these shapes of dragons and botanical things like berries and little onions and vines. Inside the box were little compartments—rolling papers, a small vile of the elfroot. Everything smelled like nature. He removed one square of brown paper and the vile and closed the box and proceeded to craft another joint right there on its surface. He emptied the vial, worked quickly and with a kind of artistry that made her think he probably did this all the time. He had been doing it for thousands of years.

Sene felt very sad. “He knows you,” she said. “He never told me.”

He glanced up at her then, sensing a change in her voice. “You are upset,” he said, regretful. “I am sorry. I should not have betrayed his confidence like that. It is not in my nature.”

She turned away from him, put her face in her hands. “It’s not your fault, Abelas.”

“There is…there is something about you, though,” he said.

She looked back at him, over her shoulder. He was intense, but not as intense as he'd seemed in the Temple. Off duty now, there was something about him, too, she thought. Inside—he was resigned but hopeful. A deep, ailing sadness and yet, there he was, wide open to her. “What do you mean?” she said.

He ran his tongue across the edge of the paper, sealing the joint, admiring his handiwork. “Your presence here,” he said. “It is a surprise, and yet, you make me want to be truthful. Honest. Perhaps it is your forward demeanor, despite the fact that we really don't know each other at all. I am not used to this.”

“I wish Solas felt like that,” she said.

“He is your lover?”

She looked away now, back to the sea. “I shouldn't have said anything. It's personal, Abelas.”

“Of course,” said Abelas, setting the painted box down by his feet once more. “I have been hearing that sort of thing a lot lately. Do you believe I ask too many questions?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t mind questions. There are just certain questions I don’t feel like answering right now.”

“Like questions about Solas?”

She did not answer.

“ _San_ ,” he said. “That settles that.”

He snapped his fingers then, lit the joint with a bit of flame from the cup of his hand. Sene watched closely, sidelong. Sene knew that if it had been Solas, he would have done something playful to light that joint, just to impress her—one of his butterflies. A bird. Or he might have siphoned it from the earth as if it had been there all along. His fire.

Abelas, however, he was all business, practical. He took the first hit, and then he held it out to her without a word. She took her turn, held the smoke in her lungs for as long as possible. He watched her closely. She exhaled, slow. Now, she was starting to feel it, her body filling with air so that she thought she might float away. “What do you know about him?” she said eventually, passing it back.

“Solas?” he said.

“Yes.”

“I know that he is a man of great resolve.”

“No,” said Sene, shaking her head a little. “Like specific stuff. How did you meet him?”

“I believe we're old friends,” said Abelas, more white smoke in the air. “Then he came to me, a long time ago. He’d been…traveling. He brought with him the choice.”

“The choice?”

“Yes,” said Abelas. “The same choice he offered you.”

He returned the joint to her. She took it, ease.

“He offered to remove your vallaslin?” she said.

“Yes.”

“He said it was a choice no one else could offer me,” she said.

“Well, I imagine that’s true,” said Abelas. “Solas invented that spell.”

She inhaled. Exhaled. Closed her eyes. Exchange. “He did?" she said, looking at him.

Abelas nodded. “He has invented a great many spells, Sene. He is a gifted mage. Though I’m sure you know that by now.”

“I am well aware of Solas’s gifts,” she said, fanning the smoke out of her face.

“Are you?”

“Please don’t fuck with me right now, Abelas,” she said. She wanted earnestness. “I’m sort of high, and I’m just not in the mood for bullshit.”

“I am sorry, _lethal’lan,_ ” he said, smiling to himself. The joint had gone out by now. He conjured another flame. “I merely admire him. I have for some time now. I did not mean to…fuck with you.”

“Why didn’t you let him remove your vallaslin?” said Sene.

“Mine is not like yours,” he said on an exhale. “Erasing the blood writing is not so easy for me. Your vallaslin was symbolic. Mine has…what is the exact word? _Thanun._ Function.”

“I get it,” she said, drawing her knees to her chest. “Solas told me about the slave markings. I know what they really are.”

“It is nothing personal, Sene,” said Abelas, “but you do not know what they really are.”

“Then tell me,” she said, looking at him. “What do they do to you.”

He became serious then, closed his eyes. He held the joint between two fingers, the smoke like a pale nest around his head. “Her song sings all the time.”

This piqued her interest. She lowered her knees. “Mythal?” she said.

“This place,” said Abelas. “It is very loud here. I am swimming in it, and yet, drawn. It’s quieter the closer you get to the sea, the higher you get off the ground. This is a good ledge.” He opened his eyes, looked up at her. “Be glad you did not drink from the _Vir’Abelasan_ , Sene. For I can tell that yours is not a spirit so easily bound.”

“What does that mean?” she said.

He took another hit, let the smoke trail from his lips, an expert. “It means you’d go mad from this. I know others for whom the call was too loud. They either perished, or if they were brave, they escaped.”

“Escaped?” she said. “How?”

“Solas,” he said.

“Seriously?"

“I see no advantage in lying to you about this.” He held out the joint to her, almost like a peace offering.

She studied him in the half-dark of the ledge. The pull of the elfroot brought her back to a time of living in treetops in the Free Marches, a loneliness that, despite her impulse to run and her odd nostalgia for home, she knew that she did not wish to repeat. She looked down at the joint where he held it between them. "I'm done," she said. "Thanks." He nodded, put the joint back to his lips and stared at the fire.

“I know so little about him,” she said eventually, watching Abelas. "Other than his heart.”

“He guards his life from you,” said Abelas.

“Yes.”

“This troubles you.”

“Sometimes. I just—I don’t know why he won’t just tell me the truth.”

“Perhaps he withholds information for good reason, Sene. Perhaps you are better off not knowing.”

“What could be so bad that he is willing to lose me rather than just tell me what the fuck is going on?”

“That is a very good question, Sene.”

“Do you know?” she said then. “Do you know what he’s keeping from me? You say you knew him in the past. What does that mean, exactly?”

“You would ask a stranger about your lover’s secret history behind his back? You do not strike me as the type, Sene.”

She was quiet. He took one last hit off the joint, but it was futile. He flicked it, dead into the fire.

“I want to ask you something important,” said Abelas, rubbing his hands together. “If it is all right with you.” He turned slightly toward her on the fallen tree so that she could see his whole face. Every part of it. He was younger than he seemed but she wondered what, in the science of ancient elves, this could possibly mean. He was like a fractured weight before her, a man of duty and yet split down the middle. He was not supposed to be here, and that he paid her so much attention that night, shared his fire, his remedies, she felt an undeniable sense of mercy and pity, and it made her want to keel over, put her hands into the grass, and breathe. Just breathe.

“Okay,” she said.

“I think it might help,” he said, “but first, I have a request. I have been smoking a lot of this _feladara_ tonight, and I would like to speak the language of the people. It is a comfort to me, and outside the drug these days, I have very few comforts left.”

“I don’t speak Ancient Elvhen,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“I know your dialect,” he said. “I have been alive for a very long time, Sene.”

With this, she sighed, nodded a little. Unsure of what to expect. But he was so earnest. “ _San,_ ” she said. “ _Lanas em nar av’ahn, Abelas_.”

He took another long, hard look at her. “ _Dirthas eolasas isa vhen’an? Vhen’an or’Solas.”_

“ _Vin._ ”

Then, he looked at the fire. “ _Asha ise isa vhen’an, Isene. Ama ha’alin, y silan. Eolasas garahen isalas eolasa._ ”

Sene stared at him. Long-haired elf, strange creature. Full of wisdom. She turned to face the Waking Sea, rested her elbows on her knees and looked out, way out, far into the distance. A future in which something, anything mattered. In this moment, sitting next to Abelas on the ledge, she felt very young and far away—from Solas, the Inquisition, everything. She didn’t realize it until now, but he had been drifting away from her for some time, and it was like, the further he got, the more tightly he clung, and she knew that, somehow, this meant that when he told her he loved her, he was telling the truth. But she still needed an answer. Why couldn’t they just be together. If it was the thing they both wanted. What was holding him back. And yet at the same time, now, she felt the futility of this questioning. And she knew that she was missing something, something really big.

“ _No brithas ha’alin, Abelas,_ ” she said, glancing at him.

“ _Enastas, Isene?_ ” he said, heavy brow furrowed. He was innocent, long-faced. These elven men and their long, sad faces.

“ _Vin. Enastan,_ ” she said.

He looked down at his hands. “ _Lanastas em_. _Sul’drhu’an._ ”

She smiled, resigned. “ _Era’mana re era’mana. Ras. Haminas nar sil, Abelas. Ma serannas sul’feladara. Dirth’sulan. No sildearan revasast. Thuast sildearan…on’el._ ”

He looked up at her, and he smiled, too. “Anytime, Sene.”

Then, he stood, abruptly.

“Where are you going?” she said.

“My vial is empty,” he said. “A great deal of _feladara_ grows at the bottom of this rock.”

She laughed a little. “Okay.”

“I shall return,” he said. “Will you be here when I get back?”

She nodded, and he disappeared into the darkness. It was easy to do that in Crestwood, and when you were an elf, and you knew how to climb. While she waited, she reached down to pick up the pretty box, the one where he kept the elfroot. She traced the dragon shapes and the colors with her fingers. She wondered if he’d painted it himself, and when, and how.

But then, she felt it—a presence. It was slow to appear. It came from the direction opposite to where Abelas had disappeared. So she set down the box and rose silently from the tree. She pulled an arrow, nocked it before turning around, but she did not draw fully. She glanced over her shoulder.

Coming into the light. It was Solas, a surrender. He was alone.

“Sene,” he said. “Here you are.”

She lowered her bow, dropped the arrow into the dirt. Almost in disbelief. “Did you follow me?” she said.

“No,” he said, shaking his head, holding out his hands. “I did not follow you.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“I tracked you.”

“Tracked me?”

“You are the Inquisitor, Sene. You cannot do this.”

“Do what?”

“Run off without explanation. Without telling anyone where you’re going. It is not safe.”

“I’m not a child,” she said, flinging the bow over her head. “I know it was stupid. But I did it anyway. I couldn’t go back there.”

“I understand. And I do not think you’re a child.”

“No?” she said, taking a step toward him. “Then what do you think of me?”

“What do you mean, Sene?”

“How long have you been here?” she said. “Spying on me.”

“I only just got here,” he said. “I was not spying on you. What are you getting at?”

“I know about Abelas,” she said. “I know that you know him, and I know that he knows you. You lied to me. Why?”

He straightened up, jaw firm. His eyes were hard and gray, and she could tell he was deeply surprised. Sene didn’t know how to feel about this. “Abelas,” he said. Then, he looked past her, saw the fire on the ledge. “He is here with you?”

“He was,” she said.

“Did he seek you out?”

“No,” she said. “I came here, and I ran into him by chance.”

Solas shook his head, sighed. “I am sorry, Sene,” he said. “I know I should have told you.”

“Yes, you should have.”

“I just—after the Temple, at Skyhold. That night. I couldn’t do it, Sene. You were upset, and then I was upset. I thought it would make everything more confusing.”

“ _More_ confusing?” she said. “More confusing than this?”

“I understand now that it was a mistake.”

She closed her eyes. The world was dreamlike, all of it still a little hazy from the elfroot. She put her hands on her head, dug into her hair, pulling some of it free. She turned away from Solas to look at the fire on the ledge, the view of the Waking Sea. Or, it wasn't even the sea, she thought. It was just part of the sea, jutting inward. Cutting the land in pieces. “I don’t want to go back,” she said to Solas. She was crying now, but her eyes were dry and thick-feeling from the elfroot. The tears almost hurt. It was like the whole world playing a trick on her. A dim, stupid trick. “I don’t want to go back. Only Cullen and Charter know about the vallaslin. Every time someone sees my face, I’m going to have to explain, which means I have to tell them what you did, and I’ll have to think about how—I just can’t, Solas.”

“I know, Sene,” he said, his voice, deep and despondent as he came toward her. “I know.”

She glanced over her shoulder, suddenly felt dizzy. She rubbed her eyes, stumbled a little bit, got down to her knees to lean forward on her hands in the dirt. She thought she might faint, or puke. It had been a while, and she wasn't used to this.

“Sene?” he said.

“I’m okay.”

But, of course, he approached anyway. He got down on one knee in front of her and tipped her chin up so he could meet her eyes. He studied her. She knew then. He could tell. About the elfroot. The smell was everywhere. Her eyes were red and puffy. But he said nothing about it. He was just concerned. "It has been a very bad night," he said. "This is all my fault."

She hung her head. She felt stupid. "I don't want to go back," she said. "I don't want to."

“You don't have to," he said. "Know that I did not come here to drag you back to the fortress."

"You didn't?"

"No, Sene. I came here to tell you that I'm going back to Skyhold."

She looked up at him. “What?”

“My presence is making it impossible for you to perform your duty here, Sene. There is still much to do, and I’ve put you at too much risk already.” He reached into his jacket with his other hand, took out a long, folded piece of parchment. “Here is your map. The shrine is not far from here. Please, go. Meet Morrigan. Like she asked."

"Alone?"

He shook his head. "Bull and Dorian are waiting at the bottom of this rock formation, and they will go with you. I'll see you when you return.”

“You'll be there?” she said, suddenly frantic. "The last time you left me like this, you disappeared for two weeks. Are you going to do that again?"

He was very serious then. He put the loose hair behind her ears—the pieces she’d pulled free before. He shook his head. “I won't do that, vhenan," he said.

"Do you promise?"

"I promise."

She sniffed once, wiped her eyes. He helped her up, and then he knelt back down to pick up her arrow from the dirt. He kept it. She looked around. The fire, the fallen tree. She wondered why he hadn't come back yet.

"You are looking for him," said Solas after a moment. "For Abelas."

"He's so alone here," she said, thinking of the little, painted box. "He was nice to me. He didn't mean to betray you when he told me that you two knew each other."

He hesitated, studied the arrow in his hands. Long and red with gold feathers. Beautiful, sharp. A perfect piece. "I know, vhenan."

"He's supposed to come back," she said. "Should we wait?"

But Solas was preoccupied, studying the arrow, her handiwork. "He'll come back," he said.

The handiwork of Sene.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Elven translations:
> 
> "Dhula or’avise." - "Hair of fire."
> 
> "Rogasha, Abelas." - "Brave, Abelas."
> 
> feladara - elfroot
> 
> sal’melin - true name
> 
>  
> 
> Abelas and Sene's conversation on the ledge:
> 
> "San," she said. "Lanas em nar av'ahn, Abelas." - "Okay. Ask me your question, Abelas."
> 
> "Dirthas eolasas isa vhen'an? Vhen'an or'Solas." - "You say you know his heart? Solas's heart."
> 
> "Vin." - "Yes."
> 
> "Asha ise isa vhen'an, Isene. Ama ha'alin, y silan. Eolasas garahen isalas eolasa." - "A man is his heart, Isene. I am an old stranger, but I remember. You know all you need to know."
> 
> "No brithas ha'alin, Abelas." - "You don't seem like an old stranger, Abelas."
> 
> "Enastas, Isene?" - "Do you approve, Isene?"
> 
> "Vin. Enastan." - "Yes, I approve." 
> 
> "Lanastas em. Sul'drhu'an." - "You forgive me. For the Temple."
> 
> "Era'mana re era'mana. Ras. Haminas nar sil, Abelas. Ma serannas sul'feladara. Dirth'sulan. No sidearan revasast. Thuast sildearan...on'el." - "The past is the past. Smoke. Ease your mind, Abelas. Thank you for the elfroot. The conversation. I do not feel free, but I do feel...better."


	29. Soft, Softer, Softest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sene must make a difficult decision on the ledge. Solas enters into a dangerous confrontation. Morrigan remembers.

_1: Fire  
_

Sene did not want to leave without waiting for Abelas.

“I told him I’d be here when he got back,” said Sene.

Solas looked up from his hands, where he still held the arrow. “What?”

“Abelas.”

“Sene.” He shook his head. “Be careful.”

She glared, reached, and took the arrow from his hands. This jarred him. “What are you so worried about?” she said.

“You do not know him like I do, Sene,” said Solas. “He is too new to this world. He cannot be trusted.”

She watched him flexing his jaw, and when he did that, she knew that meant he was thinking. Always thinking. “He told me more about your life in one night than you’ve told me in months, Solas.”

“What, exactly, did he tell you?” said Solas.

“He told me you’ve removed the vallaslin from other elves,” she said. “Ancient elves, like him. He said you invented that spell. Was he lying?”

They could hear the waves now, out on the water. Mean, earthly sighs. “No,” he said.

“Why didn’t you just tell me?”

“I am sorry, Sene.”

“You’re sorry,” she said, staring at her boots, big and stompy. She hated them. “You’re always sorry, Solas.”

“Not always,” he said. “But right now, yes. I don't believe I've ever been more sorry.”

“He defended you,” said Sene, glaring. “He spoke as if he looked up to you.”

“Listen to me,” said Solas. He came toward her, but she backed away. He stopped cold and lowered his voice. “Abelas is a good man at heart, Sene, but he is not bound to his own free will like you and me. That is all that I am asking you to understand.”

“You’re talking about Mythal,” said Sene.

“I am talking about compulsions that Abelas cannot control, should they find him.”

“Then remove his vallaslin,” she said.

“I have offered to do it for him countless times. It is a spell that only works on the willing.”

“Who is she?” said Sene. “How can she still control him if she’s gone or—dead?”

“These are questions without definitive answers. It is all very confusing from here, vhenan.”

When he said this, when he called her that, it was like a knife in her brain. She realized that she’d been talking to the sky for a very long time. She hadn’t looked him in the eye once. She’d been afraid that if she did, she might yield to him, because that is what she wanted to do. Yield. Give in. She wanted to pretend that everything was okay, even if it wasn’t, just to be with him. And so when finally did look him in the eye, and she saw him there, his hands deep in his pockets, staring at her with his face intense, deeply concerned, she started to cry, and this made her embarrassed, so she put her hands on her head, turned away from him and walked to the fire.

“Sene,” he pleaded.

“You came all the way here,” she said. “You tracked me all the way here.”

“I had to,” he said. “Cullen was ready to send an entire army out on your behalf. This was the better option.”

She laughed at this. She kicked a whole bunch of dirt into the fire. “You should have just let him do it.”

“Be reasonable, Sene.”

“No,” she said. “You could have just sent Dorian up here to tell me what was going on. Or Bull. Instead you came up yourself. Why? Just to tell me you were leaving and then fight with me over Abelas?”

He took his hands out of his pockets, pressed them into his eyes. “Fuck, Sene.”

“What, Solas?”

“I am here to beg for your forgiveness. Don’t you see that? I handled things terribly out on that bridge. I need to try and explain myself.”

“Then explain,” she said.

He dropped his hands to his sides, shook his head. “I am confused, Sene,” he said. “You know it’s true. I need space. I am sorry for that, but I need it, and to get it, I know that I must cut a line between us. But there are so many lines between us, Sene. So many lines, and some of them are twisted into bramble and some of them have grown straight down into the earth. I don’t want to cut them all, but I don’t know which line is the right line to cut. That is what happened on the bridge. Then I thought that perhaps going back to Skyhold, alone—that it would help me clear my head. Find the answer. I do not want to do any of this, but I fear that if I don’t deal with it now, I will lose you for good, in a way that is too permanent for me to even comprehend. This is not about Abelas. And while, yes, I will admit that the thought of you alone with him unnerves me to a significant degree, I know that it is my fault you are here at all, Sene. All of it is my doing, and all I want is to figure out a way to fix it and to still be with you, but I don’t know how. I just don’t know how.” He took a step back. There was very little light on the ledge now. It was right on the edge of morning, and yet, he could still see the fast, red whip of her hair. He waited.

But before she could say anything, there were the sounds down below of a fight breaking out at the dark bazaar, and this usurped her attention, immediately. Used to the throes and demands of leadership, even if it was unnatural to her. It was something she’d learned over time, and it made her weary, and yet she still put a hand on her bow and rushed all the way to the edge of the cliff so that she could see what was going on. She got down on her hands and knees, searching the coast but everyone was too little down there. She saw only black shapes, a tussle. She got back to her feet and looked at Solas.

He did not seem concerned. Not about this, at least. “Bull and Dorian are well-hidden,” he said. “I promise that is not them. Do not worry.”

“What about Abelas,” she said.

Solas took several steps toward her. He stepped over the fallen tree. “Abelas cannot be defeated by one hundred human bandits, let alone a single, sad parade of them. You needn’t worry about him either, vhenan.”

He was close now. His size and shape. Still hesitant on the other side of that fire, but he meant this as a comfort, reassurance in a time of literal distress. It was pure, just a habit between them. She trusted this, took her hand off her bow, and she watched him, waited. She was afraid of all this shit happening between them, but she knew that she wanted him to be there and that she always would. So she allowed his focus, and she matched it with her own, and when finally, the moment got too big between them and that ledge too fucked and filled with their love, she let go. It all broke down—the fear, the anger. And she dropped her guard. She went to him.

Perhaps it had been the realization that they were no longer in danger that did it, that their friends were safe—it was all too familiar for them and brought them both right back to the beginning. Solas stepped around the fire, and as soon as he was there in front of her, he put a piece of loose hair behind her ear and lifted her chin so that he could get a better look at her face, and she could get a better look at his, and that is when she stood on her tip-toes and kissed him.

It was a soft kiss. It reassured them both, somehow, because it was neither frantic nor rushed. Just a kiss, locked and real, and then, because she knew what she had to do, she placed both hands on his cheeks, and she brought it to an end, and then she waited for him to open his eyes, and she told him the truth. The thing she had known all along.

“I realized something, Solas,” she said. "In Val Royeaux."

“What, vhenan?” he said. He traced his thumb across her lower lip.

She had to look away. “It’s about us,” she said, his knuckles lingering at her jawline. “You and me, our bodies.”

“Bodies?” he said, coaxing her to look at him. "You mean intimacy?"

She nodded. “We need to take a break, Solas.”

He smoothed his whole hand over her hair now. "A break?"

“Not from everything,” she went on. “Just the big stuff. The sex.”

“You think it is too much?”

She studied him as he studied her. “I think that every time you get close to opening up to me, Solas, you just bury it all inside me instead. I think that if you’re looking for the right line to cut between us, this is it. This is the way.”

He held her face now, was searching her eyes, looking for a question or anything out of the ordinary. Had he come up here, hoping she would talk him out of it? The whole thing? Perhaps. But Sene was easy to read. She always had been. And she meant this. And she was right. He had to admit it to himself. Because he felt it in that very moment: every time she allowed him to be weak like this, to let go, to want, he got so gut-fucked and awed in love with her that the only thing he knew to do was to worship her. And the best way he knew to worship Sene was to put himself inside her. To unfold himself at her feet, and to love her, emptied and pure. Hands, antlers, and bone. He wanted, she granted, he took. _Acts of godhood._ That’s what Abelas had said, only this was not what he had meant. Solas was supposed to be a man, but he was weak, and he did not feel like a man. Lost inside a dead boy’s dreaming in the dark. He had accused Abelas of being under a compulsion, but was he so different?

He lost it. He looked at her. "You're right," he said.

He backed away from her with his head in his hands. Then he fell to his knees, and he could feel her following him, trying to bring him back up as she always did, but it was no use. "Sene,” he said, dead weight inside the earth. “Sene, please.”

How many times did he say her name like that, trying to get her to give up on him? Tens? Hundreds? Thousands of Senes. To the end of days it seemed. And to an ancient elf of Arlathan, maybe that wasn’t so long. But to Sene, it was forever.

He finally left after that. Finally. He said goodbye, and he told her to be careful, please Isene, be careful at the altar. And he dragged himself beyond her grasp so that she could not touch him anymore. So that he could not feel her anymore. And as Sene watched him go, she thought about Crestwood, and these long, purple nights between them—that time they’d made love in the cave under the castle, and that one simple night they’d spent together in the belfry. How he’d took her to the pool and removed her vallaslin, and then they broke up on the bridge, and then they kissed and parted on a ledge over the water not half a day later. How it was all mixed up now, like a stupid song in reverse. She wanted to scream.

 

_2: Pride  
_

Old Market Road, for the most part, was just a wide open tunnel between two canyons. Solas had been moving downhill for a long time. He was not supposed to take the main road back to the fortress, but he did anyway, because otherwise, he kept losing ground, having to retrace his steps. The road was easier, simpler, as slowly, he unraveled. He kept seeing her there, in a dress, in a kitchen, holding a plant in the sunlight. It was Cole who’d said this, but now, with everything, it lived in him. Breathed in him. It was so maddening, he had to force himself multiple times to keep from turning back, and because of all this, and because it was so early in the morning, and the morning was so quiet, and the night had been long, he had not been paying very close attention, and that made the thing that was coming that much worse.

The sun had risen a little while back now. The weather in Crestwood, Solas thought, was always a bit warmer than it should have been. He took off his jacket, furs, everything, threw it all over his shoulder. He kept closing his eyes to shake loose his anxiety, to free himself of Sene, and to try and forget the very reason they were there in Crestwood in the first place. He could only sense Mythal if he wanted to. Otherwise, she was not there anymore. Just a wisp, and while he was glad not to be too near to that altar, he did not sense danger here. Not from her. Not now. Just that old, sane song of hers, and he knew it now, how it sounded like Sene, the energies of her insides, the music in his dreams, and the two of them together in his mind could be very confusing. But Mythal, as long as she could be reached, would help. He knew her in times like these best of all. It crushed him and then drifted away. He thought of all this as he walked along the road alone, in just a pale, long-sleeved undershirt, jacket tossed over his shoulder, chewing on a reed he'd plucked from somewhere back toward the sea.

But when he saw the grisly scene up ahead, he stopped cold. There was a man, shirt bloodied up bad, hands pressed to his gut and very still, slumped against an upturned carriage in the middle of the road. The carriage, its tarp torn and flapping in the wind, had been tipped over violently. There were empty crates and bottles everywhere it seemed, and a good amount of blood in the dirt. The whole scene was like a nightmare, distilled, and sad, but perfect, like something out of one of Varric’s books, and when Solas got to the man to check his pulse, it was too late. The man's blood was still warm, but he was dead. Solas dropped his jacket and hung his head. He did not know this man, but he had some idea of what had happened here. The man was dressed in blue slacks and a faded coral shirt—the linen fine, the dye-work unmatched, and with everything else about him so simple and unadorned, Solas knew this was a cotton farmer, and he know this meant that it was unlikely this man had been traveling alone. These were family farms. Solas searched him gently, finally pried open his fist and found that he'd clutching to a pale iron wedding band. It was unique, with a lovely filigree around the edges—frogs or something like that, maybe lizards with flowers. Solas pocketed the ring, saddened and closed his eyes. He tried feeling through the scene for some trace of her, the man's wife.

But before he could really get a hold of anything at all, he sensed that he was no longer alone. It was a bad feeling, unclean, like a challenge. Solas stood, tall and wary in the sunlight, and turned around. The day stretched out before him, a great, yawning sky overhead.

There were five of them there now, bandits: rough and big, with clubs and swords. They'd materialized silently in a loose half circle around the scene. Another man stood out front, in the center, an apostate with his staff in hand. Blanched heat pricked like a thousand pins in the back of Solas’s neck. The apostate had dark hair, patched eyebrows, all cracked in the way of youth. He was their leader. Solas tilted his head back once he realized this, breathed, and closed his eyes. He could feel himself coming loose around the edges, like a door hanging off its hinges, and on no sleep and all this shit happening with Sene—it happened fast, like grit in his eyeballs, scratching and itching to get out—not a feeling he liked, but a part of him that he knew all too well. He was very angry. The sun was a dreaded temple overhead. Solas took his hands out of his pockets, opened his eyes, and, still chewing on that reed, he stared.

“He looks like Inquisition,” said one of the bandits. He was older and held in his hand a fiery longbow—excellent craftsmanship, almost certainly pilfered off something dead and Dalish.

“It’s the apostate,” said another one, short but barrel-chested. “Right hand to the Inquisitor. This man took our fortress.”

Their Fereldan accents were thick as weeds. They all seethed there, bothered at one another with gossip and undisciplined desires. Except for the apostate. The apostate was taller than the other men, and stronger. A kid, Solas decided. Twenty-five at the oldest, but with some semblance of diplomacy. It was odd. He stared at Solas with suspicion, but even still, Solas saw straight through to the roots of his teeth, into the weird pine needles of his soul.

Solas sighed. “It was never your fortress,” he said to the bandits. He began adjusting his gloves at the wrists, squinting into the sunlight. “Though I understand your confusion. Being bandits and all.”

“We should kill him,” said the third bandit. “Put his head on a pike as a warning.”

Solas raised his eyebrows in invitation. He looked at the kid. “Do you know who I am?”

“I have some idea,” said the kid.

“Then you might know that removing my head from my body and placing it on a pike would not only be extremely difficult for you, it would also be inadvisable.”

“The farmer fought when we attacked the carriage,” said the kid. “We defended ourselves. That is why he is dead.”

“So you attacked a local farmer’s carriage on a main thoroughfare in broad daylight,” said Solas, cracking his knuckles, “and when the man defended himself, you killed him and, presumably, his wife as well. Or am I wrong about that? I do not see her body. Perhaps she is somewhere else, held hostage as a plaything for your vile perversions. Tell me, boy, are you proud of this?”

The kid took a step forward, then another, separating himself from the rest of the group. Solas took the reed out of his mouth and dropped it at his feet. The other bandits feared the apostate, which is why he lead them, and this was something that Solas understood. The kid had green eyes, sort of like Sene’s, and he was proud but a product of poor, unyielding circumstances, and this is also something that Solas understood. But there was something else, too in the kid’s eyes. He had a married look about him. He was young, but he was also a husband, maybe a father. He had a full heart underneath all that scorn. Solas could sense this. It’s the way you get when there’s something running around in the world with your name on it. Your blood. Your possession and your sacrifice. Solas understood this, too, though it was not an understanding he’d ever had with an enemy before. It intrigued him.

“Have you no answer?” said Solas finally. “Shall I proceed?”

“Give us your staff,” said the kid to Solas. “And we will let you go.”

Solas laughed at this. The other men descended, very serious now. Their weapons wet and blunt and hard and ready.

He shook his head. “You know that I am not going to do that.”

“Your staff,” demanded the kid.

“Or what?” said Solas, starting to lose his temper a little. “I am the Inquisition. I know the Inquisitor personally. I stole your fortress by her side, and I probably killed a good number of your friends in the process. Do you really think your men here are going to let me go? Or, perhaps the better question is, considering who I am and who you are, do you really think that _I_ am going to let _you_ go?”

The kid narrowed his eyes. He was thinking. “What are you going to do then?”

It was an odd question, brave even. Solas respected this, but at this point, he was already pissed-off, and he did not want to be here, and he did not want these men to be here either. So he straightened his gloves one more time, and then he dropped his hands to his sides and clenched them into fists. “I’m going to give you a choice,” he said to the kid.

“What choice?”

“This one.” Solas sucker-punched the kid in the jaw, once. He hit him so hard, so fast, the kid staggered, dropped his staff, and spun around and hit the dirt, face first. He writhed there in the yellow sun for a while. Solas shook out his knuckles. Then he spat into the dirt and waited for the dust to settle at his feet. He looked at the rest of them after that. They were leaning in, staring at their incapacitated leader, but none of them moved. Not yet.

“You may choose to run,” said Solas, rolling his sleeves up past the elbows. “If you do, you will most likely be apprehended by Inquisition soldiers and returned to our stronghold. The Inquisitor is a merciful woman. She tends to see the good in people, even people like you. She would probably let you off with a mere dose of exile. I have never once witnessed her order an execution on sight.”

“And if we choose not to run?” said that first bandit. "What then, knife ear?" He had a pale, mean face and a brown tooth. It looked loose there, dangling.

Solas glared. “Then you will die here,” he said. “For I am not as forgiving as the Inquisitor. This is my territory. I take the deaths of cotton farmers in Crestwood very personally, and so to me, you are lower than insects. A plague on this land, and I would just as soon purge you from existence with very little hesitation. But I like choices. They make me feel good. So consider your options, and do it now. Your lives lie, quite literally, in the balance.”

There was a strange whistling then as the wind swept through the canyons. Dust and seed and pollen and scale. Two of the bandits immediately broke into a run, unthinking. Solas watched them disappear over a hill to the north, let them go as promised. But the other three—they were gnashers: large, brutish, creatures, committing to the attack, very little strategy, nothing to lose. The moment they approached, all that Solas did was close his eyes and send them out, up—like sacks of flour into the high canyon walls. The sounds of their breaking bodies sickened him, but he did not move, and neither did he react. All but one died on impact, and the last did not make it very far. It was the man with the brown tooth, but now that brown tooth was gone, and when Solas finally walked over to survey the damage, that last living bandit was gasping in the weeds, and very close to death. He had broken something bad, something deep. Solas searched him. He found another ring, this one on a piece of twine around the bandit's neck—a pretty piece with a small, blue stone beveled at the center, a traditional wedding ring for an Andrastian women with the same unique filigree as the ring in his pocket. Solas broke the twine and pocketed the ring as the bandit struggled. Then, with a single gesture, he broke the man’s neck, put him out of his misery. He stood, and he breathed. It had all been very fast.

Solas stood, pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, and shook his head, hard. It had been a long time since he’d engaged in raw combat like this—since the Arbor Wilds at least, and even then, he had not been alone. Being here, without Sene, without Bull or Dorian or Sera or Cassandra there to soften the world around him in the aftermath, to catch him hard as he went down, it was like being opened up inside with cold and ancient instruments. He was a blunt object, fashioned to kill. And he felt hard and mean and unforgiving, and it was terrible, and he found himself in some sort of dire passage. He thought back to the Red Templars in the Emerald Graves, the looks on their faces as he pit them against one another or ripped out their lyrium-infected hearts with his bare hands, and in that moment, he found that he missed Sene so bad he almost keeled over and lost his guts in the grass.

But he didn't. He composed himself. He dusted off his armors, peeled off his gloves and dropped them into the dirt by his feet. Then he examined the knuckles of his right hand. Old wounds opening back up again. The smoke was thick in the canyons as the fire from before had begun to spread to the treeline. This yanked him hard into the present, so hard he was almost grateful. Solas stifled it with one cold gesture from his staff, and then he moved unsteadily to the kid in the dirt.

The kid was sitting up now, gasping and holding his jaw, half his face like a piece of raw meat as he reached for his staff. He spat a mouthful of blood at Solas’s feet, but Solas ignored this, crouched down to meet the kid at eye level. He then took him by the collar. Cowering, the young man broke.

“Where’s the wife,” said Solas.

“Please,” he said.

“Where is she.”

“I pulled one of my men off of her when we saw you coming,” said the kid. “She ran.”

“Where.”

“I’m not sure, a cave nearby.”

Solas glanced around. “Is she alive?"

"I think so. Yes."

"You say you pulled your man off of her.”

“Nothing happened,” said the kid. “She got away.”

Solas paused. The kids earnestness in fear was surprising, almost like a child's. He loosened his grip and sat back on his heels. He looked around, and finally, he felt whole again. Felt real, like the same man he was when he’d got here. He let go of the kid’s collar altogether, let him fall back into the dirt. “Leave,” he said.

But the kid was hesitant, disbelieving. He pushed into a sit, staring up. “You’re letting me go?”

“You have a wife,” said Solas, "and a child. Am I wrong?"

“No. How do you know?”

"I just do," said Solas. "Now, leave." He got to his feet and looked down at the boy, stern and unforgiving. “Go home,” he said to the kid, “kiss your child, and let your wife heal your wounds. Never come back here.” Solas took one step back to give the boy a bit of space. “Now, before I change my mind.”

Without another word, the boy scrambled up from the dirt, picked his staff out of the weeds, and ran away up the road. Solas waited until he was out of sight, and the moment he was alone, he folded himself over, put his hands on his knees, and breathed. He looked around—four dead men, mangled in the dirt.

After a bit of searching, he found a small trail of blood leading from the carriage into a small cave by the side of the road. He followed it, cautious, all to way at the end, and that is where he found her—the dead farmer's wife, very much alive. Cowering in the dark, she was clutching to a leather-bound book, bleeding from somewhere and terrified, and Solas, exhausted but as practiced in the ways of distress as he was in destruction, approached with tender caution. He fell to one knee before her, and he showed her his bare, half-bloodied hands.

“I will not hurt you,” he said. “I am not one of the men who did this.”

She was shaking, looking up at him in the scarce light of the cave with sharp, black eyes. Her face was dirty and gaunt, but she was not frail, and she had thick wrists and hardened hands that she used to hug that book to her chest. She was somewhere in her mid to late twenties, Solas wagered. She wore a long, green dress, and she was about eight months pregnant.

When he saw this, Solas froze, ripped so hard into reality that it was like a boot in his stomach. He lost his breath completely. “You are wounded,” he said to her, shaking his head. “Where?”

She showed him. She had a deep gash across one of her forearms. He reached delicately, studied it, could tell it had been bad at first, but she’d tied it off with a handkerchief pretty good, and the bleeding seemed to have slowed. It was a flesh wound. It would heal.

“You’re Inquisition,” she said, tucking her hands back around her book, the round of her belly.

His brow softened. He nodded. “Yes. My name is Solas.”

“I know who you are,” said the woman. “I have heard the stories.”

He tried to smile.

“I know my husband is dead,” she went on.

“I am sorry I could not get here in time,” said Solas.

“Are they all dead, too?”

“Not all of them, but you are safe now.”

“We were just bait,” she said, shaking her head. “Me and him. Heroes like you come along, and the price on your head is a lot higher than anything they could gather from us.”

“I am not a hero,” he said.

“Maybe you don’t think so,” she said, “but with all due respect, Mr. Solas, everybody else does.”

“There’s no _mister,_ ” he said. “It is just Solas.”

“My apologies.”

“It’s all right.”

“There were at least five of them, Solas,” she said, struggling to push up with her back against the wall. “Bad characters. Really bad. Where’s the Herald of Andraste?”

“I am alone.”

“Alone? Then what they say about you is true.”

“What do they say about me,” he said.

“That your fearlessness is matched only by your strength.”

He stared at her. “A generous supposition, I assure you.”

“One of them was good,” she said then. “The mage. Or, apostate. Whatever. I’m not sure. He wouldn’t let them—he pulled one of them off me.” She stifled a sob, feeling along the backs of her legs. “It’s not important,” she said. “I just thought you should know.”

“The apostate is gone,” said Solas. “But he lives.”

“He does?”

“Is everything feeling right?” he said, looking her in the eye.

She glanced downward, took a deep breath. “I felt it kick just a minute ago,” she said.

“That’s good,” said Solas.

“I think so. This thing kicks all the time. He’s got his feet in my ribs.”

“What is your name?” he said.

“Cassandra,” she said. She choked up a little, sniffled, smoothed the matted brown hair off her cheeks. “But you can call me Cassie. My husband and I are—were—cotton farmers.”

The name, it made him smile. For real this time. “You are not the first Cassandra I’ve met in dark times,” he said.

“This is not a dark time,” she said.

Funny, he thought as he helped her to her feet. What she'd said. It reminded him of something Sene would say. So simple, but true in a way he never could have conceived of on his own. “I hope you’re right, Cassie,” he said.

“I am.”

 

_3 – Crow  
_

Morrigan stood in front of the altar, looking up. She was exhausted, as if she'd been on her feet for days. It was true that the altar had shifted locations. At first, she'd thought it was closer to the Temple, as that was where one would expect it to be. But Crestwood—this place beckoned her like a distant lover. It was a place she needed to feel, to understand for herself. She had never actually been to Crestwood before. So it was new to her.

“They are late,” she said eventually.

“Perhaps they just got lost,” said Harding. She'd been sharpening her knife on a stone for over an hour.

“Hmm.”

Morrigan turned around. The clearing was deep, and just like every other clearing in Crestwood, this one was inside a cave with a great, wide open ceiling—scattered foliage in the shapes of emeralds, the long flat treeline overhead. The flowers here, something about this place was ancient. Many things did not belong. Her heart that day was in dichotomous confusion. Girl and yet dragon, man and yet wolf. One ear on the wall, she listened, but who was knocking there? It was like a course liquid inside her veins, scattered with nails and powder, and she felt deeply welcomed. It unnerved her. As a child, she’d liked to bury things in the earth to keep them hidden from her prying mother. Sour berries, handkerchiefs, figurines of winter soldiers she’d found in a dead girl’s sack. Wherever she hid them, the earth forged little foci. Morrigan’s energies, her secret smilings made ominous and real. She could feel them now, glowing, humming from far away in the Korcari Wilds. Striking a perfect chord with all that she heard here. There was music in Crestwood. A long, cold song. The energies of this clearing smelled and looked life-giving, but she sensed a madness underneath. Almost like envy. And in any case, traveling far, as she had been for more than a week with Scout Harding and an escort of fifteen Inquisition scouts, she missed Kieran. At Skyhold without her now, he’d be safe. But his little voice called as a birds to her. Did he miss her, too?

_Of course he does, Morrigan. Do not be so hard on yourself._

“Here they are,” said Harding at some point.

"Ah.” Morrigan glanced up, saw the Inquisitor, tall and flanked by the Iron Bull and Dorian Pavus, appearing from the darkness at the mouth of the cave. “It is about time,” she said. “But where is Solas?”

“I’m not sure,” said Harding. "Want me to check it out?"

“No, no,” said Morrigan, leaning on her staff, waving the Inquisitor over with her hand. “I will ask her myself."

 

Once Solas was gone off the ledge that morning, Sene had tried waiting for Abelas, but Abelas never came back. Concerned, she decided to leave a note for him on a corner of parchment ripped from Cullen's map to the altar, tucked it into his little dragon box by the dying fire. _You know how to find me_ , it said. _Sene._ She felt guilty, but she had to go, and she also knew that Solas was right. She should not underestimate Abelas. He would be all right, and she knew that, somehow, she would see him again.

At the bottom of the ledge, it took a fair bit of hunting, but Sene did finally find Bull and Dorian, asleep, curled into one another at the base of a very wide tree. She did not want to disturb them, but she was unsure of exactly how Solas’s invisibility spell worked, or how far it went or what it was even doing. So she climbed that tree, put herself on a branch, somewhere in the middle, straight overhead, and she hung her head between her knees to try and gather her bearings. Her mouth was thick and dry, and she was hungry. She was very tired. At one point, she fell asleep trying not to think of Solas, and so she dreamed of him instead. Like some stupid forever in the shape of a man, and in her dream, all they did was hold hands like two happy idiots inside a mystery garden and stare at a bush full of daisies. It was stupid. It was the best dream she’d ever had.

Then, it was like a rock storm.

“Boss,” said a voice from below. Familiar. She felt a shaking. “Hey, boss. You alive up there?”

She opened her eyes, leaned forward on the branch. She’d grown so expert at sleeping in trees, she’d forgotten where or what she was doing. “Shit,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “How long was that?”

“Well,” said Dorian, glancing around. “The sun is up. So I’d say long enough. In any case, we’re going to be late.”

Sene closed her eyes, swung her feet over the side of the branch. Then she dropped, spry, to the earth, stumbled. Bull caught her and gave her his canteen. She drank. Opening her eyes, she shook the leaves out of her hair. There was a bug in there, too. A little beetle. She flicked it away, smelled smoke. Curious. Then, she saw both Bull and Dorian watching her, boyish and relieved.

“You okay, boss?” said Bull, clamping his hand to her shoulder.

“Maybe,” she said and yawned. “For the most part, I guess.”

“You shouldn’t do that, you know,” said Dorian, adjusting his collar.         

“Do what?”

“Run away like that. Maker knows I like to see the Commander squirm as much as the next mage from Tevinter, but you nearly gave the poor man a heart attack. And we needn’t even mention Solas’s reaction. Obviously.”

“I’m sorry,” said Sene. “It was stupid. I was just—” She realized then. She touched her face with her hands, looked at both of them. They hadn’t said anything.

“We know about your face, boss,” said Bull. “Solas told us on the way here. It looks good.”

She peeked up at him. “He told you?”

“Of course he did,” said Dorian.

She put her hands on her head, pushed all the loose hair off her face. Sweating in the Crestwood sun, she felt herself wanting again, and she was embarrassed as she started to cry, and so she turned and walked over to the tree and leaned against it. She shook her head to kill the tears.

“Sene,” said Dorian, gentle. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

She didn’t answer.

“Hey, boss,” said Bull. “Boss. Look, we can forget the whole thing if you want, okay? Go back to the fortress. Have a drink. Have twelve. The shrine will still be there tomorrow. Probably.”

She smiled at this. Her heart, a halo. She turned around and dried her face on her sleeve and tried very hard to understand herself as the kind of girl who could lead them—these men and their harrowing love for her.

“I’ll be fine,” she said, handing Bull the canteen. “I want to get this over with.”

“Splendid,” said Dorian.

"Good choice, boss,” said Bull. “Though we’d have gone with you either way. You know that.”

She smiled, nodded. Then, she tugged the braids out of her hair and fixed it up into a high ponytail instead. The twine barely held but Dorian had nimble fingers and he helped her make it as tight as it would go.

 

“I see you are without your Solas this morning,” said Morrigan now. "And without your vallaslin. Curious." She'd already sent the others away. The two of them stood in front of the altar at the shrine like little daughters. More alike than they realized.

Sene touched her face, just once, but she did not feel like talking. “Solas removed my vallaslin yesterday,” she said, matter of fact. "He had to go back to Skyhold."

Morrigan glanced at her. Sene was a tall creature, furious as anything and yet, so young, forgiving. She watched that altar as if she half-expected it to come alive. “I did not know such a spell existed,” said Morrigan.

"It does," said Sene.

“Clearly. He still knows he is helpful to have around, correct? Given his expertise.”

“Are you complimenting him?” said Sene.

“Perhaps.”

Sene smiled. “Do you have any idea what we’re dealing with here, Morrigan?”

Morrigan shook her head and closed her eyes. She'd felt through the paths of existence to this very place a thousand times. In her mind, it was heart-shaped. But not the kind you draw on paper. The kind that beats in your chest. “We will know soon enough,” she said.

"Can you read this?" said Sene.

Morrigan opened her eyes. Sene was leaning closer to the altar. She scrubbed a hand across the inscription.

Morrigan nodded. “I have been staring at this altar for some time, Inquisitor. It is merely a welcome, from the All-Mother. It promises justice for the faithful. The ending is particularly interesting, however. _Cry havoc in the moonlight,_ it says. _Let the fire of vengeance burn._ ”

“Vengeance,” said Sene.

“Yes,” said Morrigan. “‘Curious, especially given your lover’s insight at the temple. Justice, vengeance. 'Tis all so…unclear.”

“I wish he was here,” said Sene. She was still touching the alter—the shape of a great winged woman—her hands gloved and she, a bright, gold piece.

“Yes,” said Morrigan, sensing their disturbance. It worried her. “That is something I can understand.”

Sene glanced at her then, eyes wide and strong. “It's time,” she said. “Whatever you’re going to do. Do it.”

“Very well,” said Morrigan. “Keep on your guard.”

Sene nodded. Morrigan released one hand into the air. She closed her eyes once more, but then, something happened. She took a step back. She opened her eyes. "This is most unexpected," she said. Or did she? Everywhere now, you could hear the bird calls and funny, singing whispers in the trees. These things were pale and little and cold, thought Morrigan, damp silhouettes. Like mist, but painfully familiar. This was a lonely place, she figured out, and it called out to its servants for company more than anything else. So many lurked nearby. As she listened to the song, she watched Sene turn around to face the clearing. The young elf, senses heightened, released the bow from her back and stood, chin high, eyes narrowed. Morrigan followed her gaze. Coming at them now, without warning or announcement, and halting at the foot of the altar, half smoke, half woman, was the old witch herself. Flemeth.

Morrigan faltered, unsteady. She was very confused. "Mother?" she said.

Sene looked at her. "Mother? What the fuck?"

But Morrigan could find it in herself to say no more. Not in that moment. Inside her, the voices went silent.

“I have been expecting you,” said the witch to Morrigan. She just stood there, very grand and very old. The light seemed to balance off of her in little jewels, Sene thought. And yet, she was human. Whole and real.

Sene glanced from Morrigan to the witch. Then, she lowered her weapon, instinctively. “Morrigan,” she said, nudging her with her shoulder. “ _Morrigan_."

“I don't know what she is doing here,” said Morrigan, an outburst. "She is a deceiving witch," and she reached out with her face twisted, and Sene stood back, surprised, and watched a cold wave of energy escape the lengths of her arms, but the witch simply tossed it away, and Morrigan fell backward into the altar.

“Now, now,” said the witch. “That’s quite enough of that.”

“ _You_ are here?" said Morrigan. "What have you done to me?"

The witch laughed. This made Sene uneasy. “I have done nothing. You drank from the Well of your own volition, child. Alas, here we stand.”

“The Well?” said Morrigan, shaking her head. “You are the one who brought me here?"

The old witch smiled.

But Sene was shaking her head. "You're Mythal?" she said. "But you're just a woman. You're a  _human._ How can that be?"

The witch looked right at Sene now, deeply curious. Her gaze like light and ash. "Once, child, I was but a woman, it's true. I was crying out in the lonely darkness for justice."

"And?"

"She came to me," Flemeth continued. "A wisp of an ancient being. She granted me all I wanted and more. I have carried her through the ages ever since."

"Seriously?" said Sene.

"That is a lie," said Morrigan.

"You hear the voices of the well, girl," said the witch. "What do they say?"

Morrigan, cautious, closed her eyes, a piece of hair falling into her face. She shook her head a little, toiled. Then, she opened her eyes again and said, "They say you speak the truth." The way she looked, shaking her head like that, it was almost like mourning. The witch looked satisfied.

"I don't understand," said Sene. "So she lives in you, and you live here?"

The old witch nodded, once. “I do not live here, in this field, but in this world, yes. In a manner of speaking, you could say that I _live here_." She took one step forward, intrigued. “I must say, child, I knew my daughter would come to me eventually in this place, but you...I had no idea that _you_ would be here."

"Me?" said Sene.

"Yes, you. I have wanted to meet you for some time."

“Do not listen to her,” said Morrigan. “Whatever she may be, I know her. She will poison your soul and leave it as carrion in the fields. If you are truly Mythal, mother, then we are all fools.”

But the witch only laughed at this. She was a rigid creature, sharp in many places, but she was not mean. There was something...soft about her, on the inside. Some sense of drama. "You give yourself so little credit, girl. I thought that perhaps by now raising a child of your own would have finally taught you something about sacrifice."

"I know sacrifice, mother," said Morrigan. "It is all I've ever known."

"A child?" said Sene.

"Yes," said the witch. "A child." She stared at Sene now, studied her, fixated—the eyes, fierce yellow lights. "Didn't Morrigan tell you?"

"What are you staring at?" said Sene.

"Inquisitor," said Morrigan. "Be wary."

“So young and vibrant,” said the witch to Sene. “You do the People proud, I see, and have come far."

"Yes," said Sene, suddenly annoyed, and therefore brave. "I do, and I have."

"I know now what he sees in you, and what you see in him.”

"Him?" said Sene. "Who do you mean, him?"

"Who do you think I mean, child?"

Sene was not sure. It was a strange question. "Solas?" she said.

"Is there another _him_ to which I should refer?"

Sene straightened up now, bristled, feeling territorial. She held her bow firmly by her side. "Why are _you_ talking about Solas?" she said.

The witch smiled, expressive, almost warm. She stood with her hands behind her back, came closer. "Because I like stories, child, and yours is a most interesting one indeed. He pours his heart into the earth at your feet. Once a man of his duty, no more, he now longs for the existence denied to him from the very beginning, even as a boy. He desires manhood, strongly, and it is all because of you.” She breathed in and out, brought one hand to her neck as if to scratch an itch. "That does not feel good."

“What?" said Sene.

“Like fire," said the witch, better now. "Beautiful seed. So simple. So fast, and so _real_.” The witch looked around, then back at Sene. "You tempt pride and sorrow both, it seems. How interesting. Sorrow is near," she said, glancing to the treetops. "Pride is not. Tell me, child. Where is he now?”

Morrigan watched from the altar, bait, it seemed. As she always had been. A tool, a pawn. When she was a child, she had liked to escape, take the shapes of crows and watch lovers kissing from the tops of high trees. She had been a romantic girl, and she liked lilies and those great big shells that you could hold at your ear to hear the sounds of the sea. Her favorite color had always been purple, like a heart, but darker, the color her fingers got when she'd go blackberry picking in the early morning sun. There was only one person she had ever told any of this, and he was dead now. But that is a story for another day.

Sene stared at the old woman in earnest. There was music, all around and inside her now, a long, loose chord. She looked back at Morrigan right away, who was alone. She stared as if she saw something that Sene could not, but Sene was not afraid. “He is safe," she said to the witch.

"That is well." The old witch grinned. “Your bare face speaks volumes, child. I did not expect this. I did not expect this at all.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!! -gala


	30. Dust of My Dust

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Transitions.

_The Earth  
_

"I did not expect this at all."

Sene felt something crash. Like a wave breaking inside her skull. She backed away. She gently removed the old witch’s hand from her hair. Like a fly, its belly in the turpentine. She wanted to cut out and run far and fast, but this wasn’t an option. She was feeling mean and a little protective. Especially now. Because whatever became of them, she didn’t like this woman’s hands in her hair, on her face, or meddling in the tangled soul of her relationship with Solas. It was not a story. It was theirs, and it was fucking hard.

“Who are you,” said Sene, taking a step back.

“Who am I?” said the witch. “I have already told you, child.”

“No,” said Sene. “You say you carry Mythal inside you, but you are not Mythal. Mythal is dead. Mythal was an elf. What is _your_ name.”

“So stern,” said the witch, clicking her tongue. "Did you learn that from him?"

“I’m done talking about my life,” said Sene. “I want to talk about yours now.”

“Mine?”

“Yes. You’re Morrigan’s mother. An odd coincidence, if you ask me. I want to know more about you.”

The old witch smiled. “You may call me Flemeth,” she said, “though I don’t know what good that will do you in the end.”

“Flemeth?” said Sene. She straightened up then, struck by something. Sene was bright, remember. She recalled everything she ever read. She had a long and stretched, wide open mind, and it had these little pockets, like magnets or fly paper, and they had only gotten stickier since Solas had taught her to keep it all still. “I have heard of Flemeth.”

“In what capacity, child?”

“An old Fereldan legend,” said Sene. "I read a lot."

“Oh?”

“It says that a long time ago, you left your husband for a lover, and when your husband found out, he tricked the both of you, and he killed your lover, and then he locked you up in the cellar beneath your house. Something like that. In the legend, it was a spirit who came and offered you vengeance.”

Flemeth tilted her head with a bit of measured scorn. “Read that in a book, did you?”

“Yes,” said Sene. “Like I said. And now here you are. And you’re saying that spirit—it was Mythal?”

“Indeed,” said Flemeth. She lifted her chin, suspicious. Outplayed. “Not many people know that tale, child. I am…impressed.”

“Good,” said Sene, shifting her bow, putting it over her head and stowing it on her back. “And now maybe you know how it feels when someone you don’t even know attempts to summarize the complicated details of your life so quickly. I don’t appreciate you spying on me or the man I love, not for your amusement, or for any reason at all. I don’t care who you are.”

Flemeth raised her eyebrows, studied, somehow even more charmed than she’d been before. “You certainly live up to your name, Inquisitor. _Isene_ is it?”

“Yes,” said Sene. “That is my name.”

“Hmm.”

Morrigan was coming down from the altar to join them in the clearing now. She grinned, studying the tip of her staff as she spoke freely. “Do you see what happens when you mistake a woman for a girl, mother? You may think of me however you wish, but you should not underestimate _this_ woman. She may be young, but she possesses the soul of an ancient. I watched her bring the entire Orlesian empire to its knees in the span of a single evening with her simple charm and wits alone. How do you think I came to be her advisor in the first place?”

Flemeth smiled. “I have no need for such fanfares, Morrigan. Though your loyalty to her warms my heart indeed. It is good to see you making a friend, after all these lonely years.”

“I’d laugh, mother," said Morrigan, shaking her head, growing emotional. "if the mere concept of your heart weren’t in and of itself so entirely inconceivable.”

Sene reached, squeezed Morrigan’s hand briefly. A warm gesture to reassure. Then, she looked back at the witch. “You appear in all kinds of legends, Flemeth,” said Sene. “You help _heroes_ like me all the time, but your reasons are your own. What the fuck is going on?”

“I nudge history when it’s required, yes,” said Flemeth, a certain smile. “Other times, a shove is needed.”

“Is that why she came to you then?” said Sene. “To incite a _shove_?”

“Mythal came to me to incite a reckoning, child.”

Sene was getting itchy, impatient. “A reckoning?”

“Yes.”

“And you follow her whims?” said Morrigan. “Do you even know what she truly is?”

“You flounder,” said Flemeth, serious now. “And you seek to preserve the powers that were, but to what end? I taught you things, Morrigan. Everything you know. Things happened to this world that were never meant to happen. She was betrayed. I was betrayed. This _world_ was betrayed.” Flemeth took a step forward. She seemed to grow. The whole world around them: vines, then wings and fangs. A sharp and troubled purple brewing. She put her sights on Morrigan. It was an old look, filled with rain and misery, black birds and little cats from cobbled streets that came in and out of the kitchen unanswered, taking a bit of milk from the bowl, crying. _Goodbye_. Sene felt consumed.

“You speak of her murder,” said Morrigan, a small voice, like a kernel. “We know the truth. Abelas told us the truth.”

“You know nothing,” said Flemeth. Dark and resolved. “Mythal was murdered by her enemies, and in thousands of years time, she clawed her way through the ages to me.  _Me._ And if she asks for vengeance, vengeance is what she shall receive.”

“More vengeance,” said Sene. “Why?”

“Because, child,” said Flemeth. She closed her eyes, tilted back her head to breathe the willowy Crestwood air. “Vengeance is the music of our time. And so long as the music plays, we dance.”

Sene didn’t know what to do. She looked at Morrigan. “This is your call.”

Morrigan seemed to crumple, but only for a moment. She pulled herself together and gave one simple nod.

So Sene nodded in return. “Flemeth,” she said to the witch. “We did not come here to tell stories. We came here because we need your help.”

The old witch, too, seemed to resign. “Against the magister who grasps beyond his reach. Yes, I know.” She turned to Morrigan, sighed. “The voices did not lie, Morrigan. I can help you fight Corypheus.”

Then, she took her daughter’s hand. Morrigan flinched at first, a compulsion. But then she shook her head and breathed, gathered her guard. “Show me,” she said.

Flemeth closed her eyes. Sene watched as some sort of magic became them. It was a feeling only, clear, like water. It seemed to fill Morrigan until she gasped. They stared at each other.

Something softened. The air. Flemeth spoke in a pale voice, like the snows in winter. “Do you understand, child?”

Morrigan pulled back her hand, wound it to her staff. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

Flemeth glanced at Sene one last time, earnest. “Your wolf,” she said, putting her hand on Sene’s shoulder. "He is lost to you?"

"What wolf?" said Sene.

“He will return to you, child," she said. "Hers always did."

With this, Sene could feel the layers beginning to peel off her heart. Little by little. Piece by piece. She was confused, but she tried not to let on. “We’ll see,” she said. She didn’t even know what she was saying. She didn't want to give anything else away. It was hers.

The old witch smiled then, patted her shoulder once, and turned, and she was gone. A wash of smoke and blue dust in the air.

The moment she disappeared, Sene looked up. It was like somebody had smashed a hole in the roof of the still, beating sky. Sun broke like lemon juice, filtering through the canopy, stinging her eyes—she was sweating. Morrigan wilted beside her. Larkspur, dried and sparrow. And then, Sene smelled elfroot, faint, curling in from the treeline, and her heart stopped.

_Sorrow is near. Pride is not._

_Banise._ “Abelas,” she said. She knew he was here somewhere.

“Sene,” said Morrigan. “Sene, are you all right?”

It was a small shock, to hear her name like that. Sene looked at her. She felt mystified. The toll from the day before, the night. It all seemed to be hitting her at once. “No,” she said. “No, I am not all right. What the fuck, Morrigan?”

Morrigan faltered. “I’m not sure to which part you’re referring.”

“Why was she asking me all those questions about Solas?”

“I—” She was shaking her head, similarly confused. “I don’t know. She is a devious woman. It is probably that she only wanted to to skew your balance.”

“Well, it worked,” said Sene, flexing her hands into fists, slamming her eyes shut. She wanted to bash her head through a window pane. “It was like she knew him.”

“You cannot trust her.”

“I can trust her to help us stop Corypheus, but I can’t trust her when she so casually spews the intimate, fucked-up details of Solas's life? What does that mean?”

“When it comes to duty, Flemeth does not play hard to get," said Morrigan. "Her advice is sound. But with everything else—she is truly sly. She is dramatic. She will attempt to hurt you, because that is all she knows, and because it entertains. That is all.”

“I just don’t understand,” said Sene, pressing her hands into her face, so hard she could feel the hot pinch of her skin.

“What do you not understand?”

“Why does everyone seem to know him but me?” She dropped her hands and turned to Morrigan, unsure of what else to do. She was loose, her heart off its hinges. It had taken a long time to come free, but now, here she was.

“Sene, please forgive my ignorance. But what are you talking about?”

“Abelas, your mother. _Mythal._ Whatever she is. She talked about him as a boy?”

“She is a witch, Sene. She knows things. She _lies._ ”

“Abelas didn’t lie,” said Sene. “He was telling the truth.”

“The sentinel from the Temple? When did you speak with Abelas?”

“Last night,” said Sene.

“Last night? He is _here_?”

“Yes. It’s a long story. I just—I don’t understand, Morrigan. Why do I keep learning things about Solas from people who are _not Solas?_ ”

“I know very little about him, Sene,” said Morrigan. “And you for that matter, but from everything I’ve seen and heard, he cares about you a great deal. I doubt he would shield his life from you with such…tenacity unless there were a very good reason.”

“That’s what Abelas said. But it’s starting to worry me. There’s too much. I feel like I’m missing too much. I just—it _feels wrong._ It didn’t before, but it does now. What’s the reason? How bad could it be? Morrigan?”

She was on the verge of tears. But Morrigan, looking at her now—she didn’t know what to do. This tall, strong creature with her red hair coming loose at the roots, little balls of frizz at her temples and the back of her neck. Sene had a way of making things clearer. This was true. Morrigan could understand how a man like Solas might take comfort in that. How she could just take her heart and make it words. How she let her actions speak. She thought of Sene, reaching out, so easy, to squeeze her hand only moments before. Was that it? Was that everything.

So Morrigan did just that. She reached out and she took Sene’s hand. She trusted herself, and she trusted Sene, and she put her other hand on young elf’s cheek—so warm, a tired glow—and she said, “It will be all right. You will see him again. And then, you will ask him.”

Right away, Sene nodded. She closed off for an instant, brought up her guard that was years in the making, and she composed herself. But then she brought it right back down. She breathed. She hugged Morrigan once, quick but true. Then, she turned around to look up at the treeline.

Morrigan was not used to this. To people opening up to her, not even her son. Kieran. His little bird’s heart. He was a self-sufficient boy, uncomplicated, just like Sene. But Sene was coming apart now. Embers. Morrigan could feel it. She was blowing away. The Inquisitor in pieces. Morrigan tried hard to understand, and she wanted to understand. She knew the basics of human decency from a childhood filled with observing life and love from the tree tops. She was not a cold woman. She was not. She just—

The world is a very hard place, thought Morrigan. It is easiest if your heart has a callus, thought Morrigan.

But were these here tenets, or were they her mothers?

 

Abelas watched Sene, as he so often did, undetectable from the canopies. He was a man of many talents, one of which had been revealing himself in increments, though he could not remember why, or for whom he had groomed himself this way. So many things were getting lost now. His mind, his body, fogged by the difficulties of living. Everything was so hard. So lonely as he smoked there. He had returned to the ledge that night, just as he’d promised, because he always kept his promises, but when he got there, something had been going on. The picture, it was another thing he was not supposed to see, and yet, he watched from the shadows anyway as Solas fell to his knees before her next to the fire. Begged her. For what, Abelas could not say. But he did know, in that moment, that by having been with her there on that ledge, alone, he had done something wrong.

He had only wanted to be her friend, but this, he knew, was not a tame inclination. She was too pretty for that. Too mild. And though there was nothing alarming about her beauty, nothing ancient, nothing tragic, this, it turned out, was a large part of her appeal. Her face—it just existed like a bell, sitting on a table top. Quiet, and certain, and simple. The hair was very curly, and the eyes were like nature. All bramble and willow, maybe pine. Clear. She seemed inordinately tall for a woman, for an elven woman especially, and this drew him, too, because it reminded him of home. She looked young, she seemed young. But she was so aware inside any given moment, even on the drug, that it had him deeply curious.

This was a danger.

Because, whether she knew it or not, she belonged to the man called Fen’Harel. The leader of a rebellion to shake the ages, as Abelas knew him. A general, a charming warrior who, if you crossed him, would reach into your throat and rip out your spine with his bare hands, then smirk as he took off his gloves. He was the battered soul. The boy wonder of Arlathan, chosen of Mythal, and tall, ruthless wolf who walked proudly by her side. Nothing to lose. Nothing to fear. Such talent, such raw bravado. Fen’Harel, who’d had a crisis.

Now, the jailer of the gods, and the creator of the known world had been brought to his knees on a ledge in Crestwood, in a time od turmoil, a time of despair. A new crisis, it seemed. He was a man now. Just a man. Gone to dust at the feet of a Dalish girl. And this, while deeply intriguing and desperately romantic, was not something that Abelas understood.

What did she offer him? How had she brought him to his knees like that? There was the way that she’d held him to the earth beside the pool, after he removed her vallaslin. That part, Abelas understood. But other than her body, and her unusually pretty face, what did she _give_ to him? How did she give it? Abelas, hiding high in that tree, the lit joint hitched to the corner of his mouth as he folded her note into the tiniest shape of an antler, desperately wanted to know.

 

Sene, taking inventory of all the things she knew about Solas:

Tall. He was tall. Several inches taller than her, which most elven men were not. And he was big, too. Bigger than you’d expect, with wide shoulders and a chest like a plank. Athletic and strong. He could diminish her with his size and he knew how to use it, but his hips and his gait were characteristically narrow, and if you were to walk behind Solas in the sand, you would see that his footprints fell close together, in one single, near perfect line. Almost pigeon-toed, but not quite. She liked him best in pale colors and the shirts of cotton tissue he stitched together himself. Because she liked the way they hung off his shoulders so she could see his collar bones, and she liked the way they stretched across his back as he leaned forward to stoke the fire, or as he painted, or as he got down on one knee to tie his bootlaces. He liked boots, like her, unlike many of the Dalish elves she knew. And he no longer wore the pendant of the wolf jaw around his neck. She hadn’t seen it in a long time. She wondered where it was.

Solas was playful. Many people did not know this about him. He was a skilled diplomat and very good at promoting himself as both serious and intense, but when he was with her, and he was unlocked, and they were alone, he always aimed to impress her, and he liked games, and he liked it when she pushed back in conversation, so that he could flex his charm, and melt her to the floor. He always won, because she always let him. She remembered in those early days in Skyhold, when they first became comfortable. How he would tease her. Draw her out, give her just enough, and then smirk, slow, and start all over again. Two steps forward, one step back, until she could not take it anymore. Then, he would give, all of himself. Full tilt. Everything she knew about sex, she had learned from Solas. Patience, how to wait. She had the things that she liked, and he gave them to her. Magic in small doses, but once he was inside her, never. He wanted only skin. Long and wet everything. He liked it when she pushed him hard into the ground and held him there. And he could fuck her into a puddle in the bedsheets, like nothing else so pure—forever. Wet and dry all over again. Mouths, hands. He had drunk from every part of her. She could squeeze him so tight, bring him to the edge until he begged. _Don’t stop, Isene. Fuck, Isene._

Solas liked fabric—soft and expensive. He liked well-drawn curtains. He could sit beside a clean window all day. He liked Sene’s hair, and she knew that the real reason he liked it was because it was a challenge. And Solas loved a challenge. He did not like tea, but he did like coffee. He liked drinking coffee in the morning, on an empty stomach, because it made him feel light, emptied, and free. He liked flowers. He kept plants in clear jars everywhere in the rotunda and in her quarters as well. He would bring the seeds in from far away places and nurse them until they bloomed. He liked to help the Chantry sisters in the garden, get down on his hands and knees, and dig holes in the earth. He didn’t mind being dirty, or sweaty, or tired. In fact, he craved exhaustion, sometimes for reasons Sene did not understand. He was a bit of a work horse with everything, and it took him a long time to wear out completely. He carried a lot of tension in his jaw. So he liked to chew things. Reeds, bark, hairpins, anything. And sometimes, she would carve him little toothpicks out of wood, sand them real smooth so that they did not splint in his mouth. He had very few belongings that she knew of. When she first met him, he even smithed and stitched his own armor, but she eventually convinced him to let Dagna take over. He was a painter, and he had an entire book filled with sketches—most of them her face and her shape, but sometimes other things as well. Animals, places, Sera, Dorian, Bull. He could be cold and aloof. He could be very, very stern. So rarely to her, but she had seen it. His magic was a rare, bright hand out of the sky. It could be solid and terrifying, but it could also be pretty and small, like his butterflies. He liked to scrap. She could sense it in him, a ragged, subconscious need to hit something. He kept it quiet, because it was not his way. But if drawn out of him: merciless.

He loved her. He felt a need to protect her, though he eschewed chivalry, and out of all their battles, their sex, and their comfort and conversations, he had never once judged her, and he always gave her a choice. She was her own animal with him, and he wanted her for exactly that. An equal, a partner. For her to pour herself into him with reckless abandon, so that he could pour himself into her in return.

Solas. There was no end. The depths to which she’d explored him were infinite, and still growing. Like trying to feel to the edge of the long and everloving universe. Somewhere in here is the thing she was missing. Somewhere in here is the man she did not know. But everywhere, there was Solas. The stars and the long, cold nights without him. She just wanted him to trust her. She knew that she was young and a little hot at the seams. But she was his, and he was hers, and together, they were infinite.

Two souls emerge from the clearing dust. Their love had been decided long ago.

 

_The Sky_

One week later, Solas was lying on his back on the highest battlement of Skyhold. He had missed the air here. Like clear liquor, bitter and white cold, and it stung his face, and he could practically taste the Veil. He didn’t want to think, and he didn’t want to feel. He only wanted to exist, without purpose. If there were such a thing. He was tired, and he had not been alone like this, really alone, since back at Haven. And even then, he could always feel her there. Like this faint whisper of heat in the distance. His hand was messed up again after the bandit in Crestwood. But the scar tissue was tough, ages old, and the field medic at the fortress was able to treat it easily.

“You use your hands a lot?” she said. He’d been sitting on a cot as she wrapped the bandage tight to his knuckles.

“Unfortunately,” said Solas, “I always have.”

“You can tell,” she said, and she pointed to the thickening of the skin around his knuckles—on the left and right. “See this? You should really stop punching things, Solas.”

Solas only smiled as he watched her finish with the bandage. Of course, it was too true.

It had taken them four days to get back to Skyhold. He, Cole, and Cassie and a small escort of maybe fifteen. They moved quickly through the lowlands by horse and by carriage. Cole liked to ride his horse up front along side the soldiers to ease their regimented brains, but Solas rode in the back of the carriage with Cassie, about whom he had learned a great deal. She had been born and raised by two blacksmiths in Crestwood, but like so many families, hers moved to the Free Marches to escape the Blight when she was fifteen years old. She’d only returned to Crestwood a few years earlier, where she met her husband and the two of them married quickly and started their farm. Her husband’s name had been John, and he had come from a long line of cotton farmers, most of them down in the Hinterlands or outside the Frostback Basin. When Solas asked what she planned to do with the farm, Cassie got very quiet and quickly vowed to sell it. She had no intention of running the thing on her own, and the moment she answered, he knew that she wasn’t ready to talk about it yet. He could tell that she was not a guarded person, but there was a distinct sense of shelter about her. She had come from a nice place and a good family, and he worried that, now, without her husband there to take her hand, a new and very thick shell would begin to take shape around her heart. She still had not let go of that book, and she offered no explanation for what it was or why it existed, and so he figured this meant it was deeply personal. He did not pry. He had no reason to.

Since arriving at Skyhold, Solas had spent his days with Cole in the infirmary, watching the spirit child work. They walked around in boots and sweaters, and Solas would sit, chewing on a flower stem, while Cole read the minds of the sick and the bleeding and put them to rest. That day, Solas left early to find something to eat, and then Cole and Cassie found him on the battlements just before sundown. Cassie with her book, and Cole, hatless, was carrying a wooden chair over his shoulder. Solas turned his head to greet them.

“Cassie wanted to see you,” said Cole, the breeze lifting the bangs out of his eyes, “but I knew you would not want her sitting on the edge of the battlement like that.”

“So you brought a chair,” said Solas, smiling.

“I am Compassion,” said Cole. “It is what I do.”

“I still don’t get that,” said Cassie, as Cole set down the chair. She swept her skirt forward and sat down with ease. She was quite pregnant, but she carried everything really high and straight out in front of her, and she was a solid, little thing. She moved with a quiet kind of balance.

Solas pushed up to a sit with his legs dangling in front of him, and Cole hopped up and sat by his side. “Cole is not a typical person like you or me,” said Solas. “He used to be a spirit.”

“Like, in the Fade thing?” said Cassie. She had her hair down and straight around her shoulders. It was so brown, plain and flat, like the earth in winter. “Anyway, I don’t have much to say about that. Only that I think you’re quite a nice young man to carry a chair all the way up here just so the pregnant lady can have a seat.”

Cole swept some of the hair out of his face. “I have carried much heavier things much farther distances, Cassie. You needn’t be embarrassed. Once I carried the Inquisitor all the way down from her quarters to the garden. She is not as light as she seems.”

“You carried the Inquisitor?” said Cassie, looking at Cole. “Why? Was something wrong with her?”

“A Shadow put his claw into her back in the snowy keep of winter dying. He killed the white wolf. It was sad, but she lived. Because of Solas.” Solas cleared his throat. Cole glanced at him, sad, sweet eyes. “I’m sorry, Solas,” he said. “I did not mean to bring it up like that. I know it still hurts.”

“It’s all right, Cole,” said Solas, quickly, looking down at his boots. “She endured a bad injury a while back, Cassie. She was unconscious for several days. But she is fine now.”

“That’s terrible,” said Cassie, leaning toward them both in her chair, arms folded around the leather book. She shook her head. “All of the horrid things you must see and endure, every day. Both of you, and the Inquisitor. Doesn’t it wear on you after a while?”

Solas picked up his head, nodded. He fussed with the bandage at his palm. “It wears quite a lot, Cassie, yes. Though your sympathy is rare. Most assume that, as warriors, we are, in a sense, inhuman.”

“I am not a human,” said Cole, “and neither are you, Solas. But I know what you mean. The cold bars pressing into your back at night. Your fist splitting open in the pale, morning sun. She still loves you. You don’t have to worry about that.”

Solas looked up at the Frostbacks, their blinking revelry. “I know, Cole,” he said, sighing. “Though it does help to hear you say it. Thank you.”

“You are welcome.”

The three of them sat quietly for a while, legs dangling or ankles crossed, sharing a kind of innocence between them. Like breaking bread. And to be cleansed of that place—the muck and heat and the purple sadness of Crestwood—it was, indeed, a respite. Even if each of them was alone.

“Cassie,” said Cole, after a moment. The wind was picking up. It would be night soon.

“Yes?” she said.

“The baby inside you, he is moving. Such chatter! He likes the quiet. He can fill it with his own noises and songs.”

Cassie felt along the top half of her stomach, felt the faint tug, the slip of a foot past her ribs. She looked at Cole. “It’s a boy?” she said.

“Why, yes,” said Cole. “I thought you knew.”

“How would she know?” said Solas, smiling.

“I—I suppose I’m not sure.”

“How do _you_ know?” she said.

“I know lots of things,” said Cole. “I can hear its little heart beating. Like a drum.”

"That’s extraordinary,” said Cassie.

“Are you certain?” said Cole.

“Yes, it is,” said Solas, closing his eyes against the evening air. He could almost feel Sene pressing against him, and pressing. And pressing. In that moment, he missed her so much. It was like a baptism. His insides, scraped clean and blue. “It truly is.”

           

He had been sleeping in her quarters, in her bed, all three nights since they’d returned. He knew that it was wrong, but the nights were long without her, especially here, because this was home, and he had tried, earnestly to be without her anywhere else, but he could not make himself fit anywhere else. This was the only place where, at night, he felt any sort of connection to the world at all, and he was desperately afraid of losing that connection. After the bandits, he knew that it was possible, and so each night, he went to her bed, and he pulled back the covers, and he crawled inside and he got warm, and he waited for sleep. He avoided the deeper parts of the Fade if he could. He did not desire distance. Not any more than he’d already got himself into. He wanted closeness. He wanted touch. So he would hover right there on the surface and feel for her. Wait for her. She moved like a bee, buzzing and bright. He could always sense it when she was asleep and dreaming, and though he did not go to her, he did allow himself to feel what it was like to have her consciousness nearby to his. The song and the warmth, pressing his ear to the wall of her lonely, erratic sleep without him. It was both a comfort and a despair. He no longer dreamed of the empty room inside of Sene. Instead, he dreamed of ribbons, pine needles, shells.

He kept the room very clean, and he shook out the curtains, and he enchanted the fire to make sure it stayed good and strong. It was getting so cold at night, colder than usual, and he knew that the seasons were changing. On the second night, he’d brought out a heavier quilt from a high shelf in the closet, and he spread it neatly across the bed. He watered the plants in the windows each morning. And he was overcome with a sense of clarity right away. He wanted to be through with the lie. He wanted to tell her the truth, and he knew that he did, he just did not know how. Every time he tried to rehearse the reasoning, it became violently tangled, as a losing battle on a bloody beach, and he knew that he could not tell her one truth without telling her _every_ truth. And there were just so many. They were rarely pleasant. His life before her had been many things, but it had never once been pleasant. And this had lead him to make terrible choices. Decisions he regretted in rapid succession to one another, and decisions he kept trying to reverse with the constant, fucked passage of time. But time was an old enemy for Solas, and he could feel it now, sinking its teeth into his softened heart. He did not want to be Fen’Harel. He did not want to be the Wolf anymore. He had made his choice. Now, he just needed to light the fire. Plant it in the snow. Somehow.

That night, when he got back from the battlements, he opened her hope chest to find the little teak box where she kept her hairpins. Josephine had given him a thorough stack of correspondence that morning—invitations, letters, and greetings that he and Sene had accrued since the party in Val Royeaux. And while it was tedious work and almost purely bullshit, he was glad for the distraction, and he was looking for something to chew on while he read. He liked the metal of Sene’s hairpins. It clicked and bent to the contours of his teeth. She didn’t like the sound and had recently taken to carving him little toothpicks out of wood, but he didn’t have any with him. She kept them in her pocket, or in the bag she packed every time they left Skyhold.

Inside the hope chest were all kinds of things things that belonged to Sene. Most of them he recognized, like the whole bags of feathers and little wooden figurines of animals she’d whittle whenever he wasn’t looking. There were brown paper pages folded into fourths, put in messy stacks, most of them fairy tales or Andrastian hymns, pretty writings she’d lifted from library books during her runaway missions to Ansburg. He found her fletching things, several hunting knives, sheathed in expensive leathers—gifts from diplomats, of course—the little bell he'd given to her as a gift in Crestwood, and then he found the feathered end of a broken arrow. The feathers were a ripe red, and though he could read her technique, and he knew that it was hers, he had not seen this particular arrow before. Whole or broken. He held it in his fingers, smoothed them past the soft of the feathers and held it to his nose. He could channel her anywhere—her energies and her touch, feel her vibrations coming off in waves, uncomplicated and pure. He took a handful of pins and the broken arrow and he closed the hope chest and folded himself into the couch. Metal pin between his teeth, he twirled the arrow in his fingers as he began to pour through the letters, one by one. Things went on that way for a while, listening to the fire draw its breath, deep into the melted evening, until at some point, there came a loud and certain knock on the door.

Solas looked up, surprised. “Who is it?” he said.

“It’s Blackwall,” came the familiar voice. “Or, Thom. If we’re going to be men about it.”

Solas put his feet on the floor, stacked the letters neatly and set them on the small, round table beside the couch. He put the broken arrow there as well. “Come in,” he said.

Thom entered the room. He wore a rough-hewn white undershirt and had his long hair knotted at the back of his head. His beard recently trimmed, he looked much better than when Solas had seen him last in that jail cell in Val Royeaux. “I took it upon myself to sneak away,” said Thom. In one hand, he held a bottle of brown liquor, and in the other, he had a deck of cards. “I thought you might want some company.”

Solas smiled, got up from the couch. “Over here,” he said. He cleared off Sene’s desk—she hardly used it, so there was very little to undo, and Thom sat down while Solas gathered two glass cups from the armoire next to the bed. “I hope these will do,” he said. “We typically use them for coffee in the morning.”

“Do they hold liquid?” said Thom.

“Quite well,” said Solas.

“Then they’ll do.”

Solas sat down, watched as Thom measured two fingers of whiskey into each wide glass.

“I heard about what happened with Sene,” said Thom, shuffling the cards. He set the deck on the table between them. “Cole let it slip when he stopped by this morning to bring me a bit of breakfast.”

Solas sighed, resigned to this, and cut the deck. He took a drink. The whiskey was warm and mellow, aged well. He shook his head as he swallowed. “I blew it,” he said. “I did not handle things as well as I could have.”

“The dust will settle,” said Thom, beginning to deal. Six cards a piece. “It always will for the two of you. And in the meantime, there’s whiskey. And there’s cards. And there’s me.”

Solas stared at him. It had been a very long couple of weeks, and despite everything he’d learned about himself and the friends he’d made here, he had not expected anything like this. “Thank you, Thom,” he said.

“It is my pleasure,” said Thom. “Now, let’s see how many different ways you can beat me this time, shall we, apostate?”

Solas smirked. Thom picked up his glass, measured the cards in his hand.

The night unfolding with beasts and empty bottles. It was a kind of understanding between them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Elven Translations:
> 
> Banise = Smoke


	31. Thirty Years of Snow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's snowing at Skyhold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "This is a story, told the way you say stories should be told: Somebody grew up, fell in love, and spent a winter with her lover in the country. This, of course, is the barest outline, and futile to discuss. It's as pointless as throwing birdseed on the ground while snow still falls fast. Who expects small things to survive when even the largest get lost? People forget years and remember moments. Seconds and symbols are left to sum things up: the black shroud over the pool. Love, in its shortest form, becomes a word. What I remember about all that time is one winter. The snow. Even now, saying 'snow,' my lips move so that they kiss the air." - Ann Beattie, _Snow_

Sene returned in the afternoon on the thirteenth day. It was cold, the sky a broad, gray hand, and the wind smelled like snow. You know the smell. Clean and winter, wide open. Like the whole world is about to change.

For two weeks, Solas had filled his days with other people, so as to avoid the quiet. Work with Cole in the infirmary, chess with Cassie in the garden, cards with Thom in Josie’s quarters while she worked. Without people, his loneliness consumed him. Chewing Sene’s hairpins as he painted in the nights, avoiding sleep. The deeper parts of the Fade were all nightmares of dark rivers filled with lost souls. He could never tell whether they were souls he knew, or if they were people from the past, screaming in voices made of wire. He wrote a letter to Sene in which he told her the story of his mother. He wrote all about their bone cottage in the Weathers, outside of Arlathan. He wrote about his mother’s cold hands and her stories, about her flowers of ice and her lanterns made entirely of glass. Her black hair, how it reminded him of licorice, and she smelled like potting soil and beeswax and perfume. How she sipped her coffee from a chipped mug that he himself had painted purple. She was a dream. Deeply broken after his father’s death, but even when he was his most insufferable self, arrogant and stubborn, she made Solas feel kept in a way that he would not feel again until Sene. So many years. She was imperfect, but she was kind. She was gentle and a woman of infinite patience. She did not deserve what happened to her. And neither did he.

He could see that now.

He burned the letter in the hearth of Sene’s bedroom.

And now, like a molten core, he could sense her coming for miles. Getting closer. And once she was at the gate, he did not want to play games. He waited, leaning against the door to her quarters. He had his hands deep in his pockets, his eyes closed, his head low in meditation. Preparing himself to see her again. Everybody moved loudly in her wake once she arrived in the Great Hall, a display of welcome. She walked between Cullen and Cassandra, armored, exactly as he’d left her, bow stowed on her back, tall, pretty and mild with her hair braided tightly to her head. He did not see Sera, or Bull, or Dorian. The three of them had probably peeled off to the Rest immediately upon entering the gate.

The moment Sene’s eyes lifted onto his, he straightened up off the door. Like metal hairpins in his mouth, he could taste her. And she, like the sort of perfect, easy creature she was, just picked up and ran to him, and she stopped abruptly right there, not an arms length away, and in one single moment, he felt the breath go out of his body and become the sea.

Without delay, Sene reached for his right hand, bandaged yet again. She studied it. “Are you okay?” she said, looking up at him.

“Yes,” he said, and without thinking, he leaned forward with his hand pressed to her braids, and he kissed her forehead. She smelled like bonfires, leaves and wilderness. She tasted like Sene.

“You should not have been on the road,” she said as they parted. "I told you not to take the road."

“I know.”

“Don’t do anything like that ever again.”

“Okay.” He smiled though, like he knew that in all this, she was bluffing. He pulled back, studied her face, traced his thumb across her cheek where the vallaslin had used to be. It was all so confusing.

“Can we talk?” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

He pushed open the door, and he held it for her. She went inside. When he looked back, he saw Cullen, a tall man of honor, and he nodded in acknowledgement. Cullen nodded as well, his arm resting on the hilt of his sword, casual but alert. He then turned to Josephine who was there to greet him with a stack of paperwork in the hall, and Solas went inside Sene’s quarters, and he closed the door behind him. She was already upstairs.

When he got there, she had placed her bow and her quiver neatly on the bed. The way she’d done it, it reminded him of that dream he’d had in the tavern in Crestwood—the hammer and the stone. She was undoing the laces in her boots now. Solas leaned against the desk, patiently, and turned to the side. “Take your time,” he said.

“I’ll just be a moment,” she said.

He put his eyes away completely as she stood with her back to him, undoing her armor piece by piece. He could tell she was not sure how to conduct herself—she could be so self-conscious—so he picked up the broken arrow off the desk, twirled the feathers in his fingers. But after a moment, from the corner of his vision, he caught her arching out of the leather, the light chainmail, her back flexing beneath the cover of a white under shirt, and he did not look, but he did close his eyes and listen. He listened as she took off her boots, went to the dresser, opened the drawer and pulled out a clean blouse, a new pair of cotton pants, stepped into them one leg at a time, fixed the buttons at the waist with care. He looked up only when he knew she was entirely clothed, and he watched her, in her slight modesty, smooth her hands over her blouse and over her hair. He watched her readying as she turned around, straightening her sleeves. He exhaled. The smiling in him so deep, it was almost something else entirely.

Sene noticed the broken arrow right away. “My arrow,” she said.

He looked at it, remembered, drawn out of his small reverie. “Oh,” he said. “Yes, the arrow. I found it in your hope chest.”

She grinned. “Looking for hairpins, I assume. Are there any left?”

He shook his head, smiling. “Not many, vhenan.” Then, he held up the arrow. “Why is it broken?”

She walked to him, and he stood up off the desk. She picked up the arrow, along with his hands. “It’s from the Temple of Sacred Ashes.”

“The Temple of Sacred Ashes?” he said.

“I still don’t remember everything,” she said. They held and studied the arrow, together. “But when the blast hit, I was thrown so far—my arrows, they shattered. I remember the crack. I found this in the dirt when we went back, right after I woke up.”

“You found it?”

She nodded.

“That’s extraordinary,” he said. Then, he sighed. “I remember that day. Meeting you.”

“I remember it, too.”

There they stood, like two tall trees. Their leaves, rustling.

“What do we need to talk about, vhenan?” he said.

She wanted to go to the couch then, where they sat, looking at each other. Solas still held onto the arrow but he could sense her anxiety.

“Is this about the altar?”

“Yes,” she said, serious.

He sat up straight. He was suddenly very concerned. “You are anxious.”

“I met Morrigan’s mother,” said Sene, pressing her hands into her hair. “Flemeth. She carries the spirit of Mythal.”

Solas was still. “She came in person?”

“Yes,” said Sene. “She gave Morrigan some information, said she would help us, but I just—”

“What is it?”

“I don’t trust her Solas.”

"You don’t trust her,” he said. “Tell me why.”

“She knew things about you,” said Sene, looking away, embarrassed. “She…talked about you. About us.”

“Flemeth talked about me?”

“Yes. It was almost like—like she’d been spying on you. On us. I basically told her to fuck off, but it was hard. She was…she did not seem evil. Just fixated.”

“Fixated?”

“You seem to know a lot about Mythal,” said Sene, ignoring his question, shaking her head. “She said she liked stories. She said she thought my story— _our_ story—was interesting.”

“That’s how she spoke of us?” said Solas. “As a story?”

Sene nodded, hung her head. She seemed defeated, and that was not like Sene. Solas set aside the arrow. In that moment, he set aside a great many things—for her, as he always would. He gathered her hands into his.

“Isene,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Look at me.”

“Solas—”

“Just look at me.”

So she did, and he could sense her breaking in half, getting lost. It felt like it had in the beginning, when she would come to him just to be consumed, and he would ask her to look at him, just so he could look at her back, and so he could teach her how not to look away.

He cleared his throat. “You are letting her get to you,” he said. “That is probably what she wants.”

“It hurts, Solas.”

“It is just smoke, Isene.”

“But why would she do this?” said Sene. “What have I done to her? It was like—like she was threatened by me or something. I don’t understand.”

“Why wouldn’t she be threatened?” said Solas. “Of course she is threatened. But you cannot let anyone control you like this. Your life is not a story. You are real.”

“I know that.”

“Do you? I understand how hard it must be, vhenan. It feels like everyone is watching you, waiting to see your next move, so that they may define you by their own personal interpretations of your actions, with little to no regard for detail or truth. So much has happened. This entire month. First Val Royeaux, and now this—I can feel you questioning who you are. But you must remember that, despite everything, you are still _you_. And there are a great many of us who know it. Who know _you._ And who love you.”

He was touching her again—just fingers to the jaw but it was like blue, blue wildfire. And she, unwitting in her own kind way, gathered his hand into her own, and she kissed it. She seemed hurried, but focused, and she closed her eyes as if in dreaming. “I missed you, Solas,” she said, her lips on his bandaged knuckles.

He smiled, pulled her in to touch his forehead to hers. “To say that I missed you, vhenan, would be an understatement.”

She sort of laughed at this. She was preoccupied, and he could feel her trying to find her center in him, but he was off-center, too. It was all a maze, and a misery. They stayed like that for a while, feeling into one another for the first time in weeks. Her mind, a warm bed.

“I have to go,” said Sene eventually, sounding regretful. “I have a meeting with Josephine.”

Solas sighed as they both surfaced, and he pulled away from her and her long lost, familiar heat. But before he dropped his hand from her hair, he felt the need to be honest with her. “I’ve been sleeping here,” he said, swallowing hard. “It didn’t feel right anywhere else.”

“That’s okay,” she said.

“But now that you’re here, I can—I will return to my quarters. It is the right thing to do. For now.”

She looked down. She nodded. “Okay,” she said.

He scrubbed his fingers in the hair at the back of her head, so invested, resisting: the urge to pull the braids free, to kiss her. The urge to undress her, to fuck her, to lose himself inside her, and then say yes when she asked him to stay. “I will see you soon,” he said.

“What are you going to do today?” she said.

“I’m not sure. I was hoping to catch up with Bull.”

“I have a lot of things to catch up on, too.” She was staring past him, out the window. The wind was tapping on the glass. She had her long legs crossed in front of her on the couch. “I’ll be back tonight.”

He smiled. It was in these moments that he saw their future, floating right past him, as if in a dream.

 

Solas took a walk to the garden. He thought he saw Sera, peeking at him through one of the windows in the tavern, but it had most likely been his imagination. Everything was cold that day, but the cold felt good, and there were some parts of the grounds at Skyhold that acted like little tunnels, cycling the wind in fast and pushing it out with great undoing. On his walk, he was approached by a young boy of about ten years old. Hands in his pockets, Solas glanced around. Then, he squinted down at the boy, and smiled.

“Hello,” said Solas.

"You’re the apostate elf,” said the boy.

Solas laughed at this. “Yes, I am. And who are you?”

"My name is Kieran,” said the boy. “My mother is also an apostate. You must know her.”

“Your mother?” he said. Then, he was struck by something. He knew this. “Your mother is Morrigan.”

“That’s right,” said the boy.

“Your father was a Warden.”

“That’s right, too.”

“A great hero,” said Solas. “If I’m not mistaken.”

Kieran smiled, red-cheeked, fair. Like a little bird wearing blue overalls over a red sweater. “You know an awful lot about him, Mr. Solas.”

“I’ve had a lot of time to learn.”

“My mother calls him that when she sings to me at night.” He fell to a crouch then, plucked a long, shiny worm from the grass—one of the last of the season, Solas imagined. “A hero.”

Solas, without a word, crouched down to meet him. Kieran held out the worm. Solas took it, studied its weird, little endless worm body. It moved slowly, as if it were close to death. “My mother used to sing to me, too,” he said.

“What kinds of songs did your mother sing?”

“She sang about my father, just like yours. Only my father was not a hero like your father. He just built houses.”

“That is a hard a task indeed,” said Kieran. “I’ve never heard of a man who has built an entire house.”

“Well, you have now,” said Solas, smiling, giving him back the squishy worm. “Make of that what you will.”

Morrigan then seemed to appear out of nowhere. She rushed, placed her dry hands on Kieran’s shoulders. He looked up at her with the eyes of a creature, dark and awash with affection. "Mother," he said.

“I see you’ve met our Solas,” said Morrigan to the boy. “Top advisor to the Inquisitor herself.”

“I heard he loves the Inquisitor,” said Kieran. “The bards at the Winter Palace sing of it often.”

“That is true,” said Solas, looking at Morrigan.

“Are you and the Inquisitor going to get married?”

Solas raised his eyebrows, glanced back at the child. “Who told you we were going to get married?”

“No one,” said Kieran, smirking.

“Kieran is…precocious,” said Morrigan, sighing. “It’s probable he invented that one on his own.”

“I understand that impulse well,” said Solas.

Morrigan bent down then, to whisper something in the child’s ear. When she finished, Kieran looked back up at Solas. “It was nice meeting you, Mr. Solas. But I must go. I’m needed in the kitchens. There is a great deal of cocoa to be made.”

“I should like some cocoa myself,” said Solas. “I hope to see you again soon, Kieran.”

Then, Kieran took his worm, and he ran away.

Morrigan watched him go. She wore a long, gray knit sweater, the hood drawn against the wind. Her hair was down. She looked very tired.

“How are you?” said Solas.

“I am as well as I can be,” said Morrigan, “considering the circumstances. I suppose that Sene has already filled you in on the details of our little excursion at the altar in Crestwood.”

“She has,” said Solas. He had one of her hairpins in his mouth now, biting down. “Flemeth showed herself.”

“Twas most unexpected,” said Morrigan.

Solas remained silent.

“She seemed very interested in _you,_ Solas.”.

He chewed the hairpin, teeth on metal. “Sene told me that as well.”

“What do you know of this? Anything?”

“I know the legends of your mother,” said Solas, “as any historian would. I am, in fact, not surprised that Mythal chose her.”

“You are not?” said Morrigan. “Why?”

Solas made a fist with his right hand, saw the contours of his healing knuckles beneath two layers of linen. “Because Mythal was ruthless,” he said. “The Dalish paint her kindly as the All-Mother, but she had her motivations. She would have preferred to embody a woman with a similar thirst for vengeance.”

“And you know this how?”

He looked at her, the stark yellow of her eyes. “It is my own educated interpretation, of course. In any case, I’m sorry for what she put you through. I should have been there.”

Morrigan sucked in a great big breath, held it for a moment, then looked up at the sky as she exhaled. “It is no bother,” she said. “In all honesty, Solas, given the old woman’s interest in Sene, having you there might have made things worse.”

“That is a real possibility,” he said.

“I hope all is right between you,” she said. “Sene handled herself well at the altar as expected, but when all was said and done, she was quite distraught. And then, when she heard of the attack on the road, she spent the rest of the day holed up with the Commander, plotting ways to eradicate the bandit sect who’d sent a faction to take your life.”

“The Commander?” said Solas.

“Yes,” said Morrigan. “He did his best to quell her fury. I do believe he succeeded, at least for now.”

Solas put his hands back in his pockets. “Yes, well. Cullen is very good at his job.”

“Indeed.”

“Morrigan,” said Solas.

“Yes?”

“Do you know where the Iron Bull went, and Dorian, upon your return?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “Lord Pavus’s quarters, I assume. Though you’d do well to knock before entering.”

Solas smirked. “I will do that,” he said. “I was glad to meet Kieran. Has he been here the whole time?”

She shook her head, put a piece of hair behind her ear. “He was reluctant to leave the Winter Palace,” she said. “It took some convincing. He only just arrived two days ago.”

“Your pain in his absence,” said Solas. “Was it great?”

Morrigan tightened the sweater around her delicate frame. “Yes,” she said, a mother’s voice, stripped down and gentle. “It was.”

Like a tempest, privately contained in a clear glass jar. The eyes, fearsome, but it was a guard. A mother’s sacrifice. He could understand her. A cool nonsense that he did not want to ignore. Not for a single moment. In the distance, he could almost hear the bells chiming him into place, little omens, or great big ones, depending on how you looked at it.

That is when it started to snow in the garden, just little flecks in the air. Morrigan held out her hand and looked up at the sky as if she hadn’t seen snow in years. The wonderment in her expression, Solas wanted to preserve it, like a flower in water.

Morrigan looked like her, his mother. It was a trick of the mind and yet, it was not. They had the same black hair, the same lost expression, skin like a hard shell, and a quiet power of the soul, even if it was buried deep. How had he not seen it before? Perhaps it had been the snow.

After a while, she noticed he’d been staring, and she waved a hand through the air between them.

“Are you with me?” she said.

He saw endings. He saw a long, quiet wick. He saw the snow gathering at the ends of her hair.

“Yes.”

“Sene has told me of your focus,” said Morrigan, “but I’ve never experienced it for myself until just now. Tell me Solas, what do you see?”

“I am sorry,” he said, still not looking away, the hairpin clicking between his teeth. He was thinking. “You just remind me of someone I used to know.”

 

Upstairs in Josie’s quarters, Sera sat in a chair across a table from Thom Rainier, looking out the window at the falling snow. Thom was staring at the side of her face. They each had a bit of tea in a cup on a saucer. Thom disliked tea. He toyed with the bag by its string. It was more like something to do rather than something to drink. Sera bit off a hangnail, fidgety, rested her chin on her knee. Thom sighed.

"Snow. Shite," she grumbled.

“Sera,” said Thom.

“Yeah?”

“You came here to talk, did you not?”

That’s when she looked at him. “I _came_ here, Thom Rainy-thingy, because you lied.”

“I know that I lied.” He looked down at his hands on the table. Big, mean, hard. “I am sorry, Sera. I truly am. But I cannot undo it.”

“Do you even know what Quiz and Solas had to go through to get you here?”

“Yes,” said Thom. “I do.”

“Dresses and gloves. Rubbing noses with the noble fuck-me-nots of Orlais. All because _you. Lied._ ” She dropped a cube of sugar into her tea. It made a splash, staining the table cloth.

“The Inquisitor,” said Thom, “generous woman that she is, will oversee my judgment tomorrow morning.”

Sera scoffed, dropped another sugar cube. “She’s going to pardon you. She would never let anything happen you, and you know it. Because she’s good.”

“Then I will live out my days in her service.”

“Yes,” said Sera, “you will, and me, too.” She was quiet then. She put her feet on the floor, her chin in her hands, sighed. “I’m not really mad,” she said eventually. “I get it, okay? So, you lied. We all lie. And we’ve all…killed things. Lots of things. Some of them that didn’t deserve it. So no moral high ground here, yeah? I just don’t want you to lie.”

“I’m done lying,” said Thom. “I promise you that.”

This made her smile down into her tea, though he could see her trying to suck it back. Sera was easy, and yet, she was not. At her center, she had a clarity about her, despite all that bluster and fear. But she was still on edge. All the time, and especially now. Thom could tell just by how ragged she’d bitten her fingernails, and by how many sugar cubes she’d dropped in that tea cup. One by one by one by one. “There’s still something bothering you,” said Thom. “I can see it.”

She sighed, reluctant. But it seemed she couldn’t help herself. “It’s Solas,” she said. “And Sene. They aren’t right, are they?”

“Is that actually what you came here for?” he said. “To talk about Sene and Solas?”

“Maybe,” she said, looking out the window again. You could feel the cold coming in through the glass, but she didn’t seem to mind. She drew pictures in the condensation: a hand, a smile, an ear. “He took her to a nice little cave,” she went on, “and then he removed her elf dealies. The pictures on her face. But now, they’re like—they’re separate. Something happened. She won’t tell me.”

“I would have thought she’d tell you,” said Thom.

“So would I,” said Sera. “But I think I blew it there. I think she’s embarrassed. Knows I don’t put much stock in the Dalish. But it’s not like that, yeah? I don’t care that she’s Dalish. I just care that she’s Sene. And she’s not Sene without Solas. Or, if she is, she’s not the same. She’s sad. Like an apple once, and now she’s just rain. Or snow. Not sure which one’s worse.”

“You’re a good friend,” said Thom, reaching across the table to take her hand in his. She was surprised by this, a tall woman, broad and ample as she looked at him. You did not want to fuck with Sera. Thom appreciated this. Respected the warrior in Sera, just as he did Sene, and Solas. All of them, so tall for elves as he knew them. Baffling, but somehow, given their duties, it made sense. “I have spent a lot of time with Solas these past couple of weeks, Sera. He and Sene are not separate. They’re just—regrouping. If that’s what you want to call it. Slowing things down a little.”

“But why go slow?” said Sera. “Life is fast. Arrows and blood and hands and such. There’s no time.”

“Life is also complicated, Sera,” he said. “And Sene _will_ talk to you about it. Eventually.”

“Hope so,” she said, studying his fingers with her own. “I just like them together is all.”

He smiled. “Me, too, Sera. Because without Sene, Solas is one sad and lonely bastard. It is not a pretty sight.”

This made her laugh, but she still didn’t look up from the table. “He’s nice,” she said. “Doesn’t always seem that way, but he is. I’ve seen it. Like a tree, only bigger. He takes care of people. You know? He deserves to be taken care of in return.”

“We all need someone to take care of us,” said Thom, sipping his tea. “Even a man like Solas cannot live off his pride alone.”

The wind picked up outside, whistling. It was bitter, the tea, in need of something, but Thom made do with the moment as it was. Because it was simple, and he liked simple. Just hands and quiet evenings. Things like winter poppies, and Josie. The smell of her hands after she finished writing her letters. Chemical, like ink and parchment. It had been more than a season since they’d met. He had grown used to it by now.

 

_Some things are like trying to crack a safe with your bare hands. Impossible, until the door falls open on its hinges, all by itself._

Solas set down his glass in the dark corner where he sat with Bull at the Herald’s Rest. He’d gone to him, in search of an out. Needing to talk to someone who wasn’t Sene. The tavern was full of serious drinkers that night, several of whom he’d recognized as a part of their guard in Val Royeaux and Crestwood. Candlelit, the world was a heavy gleaming. The outside was getting dark with snow.

“You’ve known this entire time?” said Bull.

Solas stared deep into the bottom of his glass. “I learned the night we returned from the Emprise du Lion. So yes, basically.”

Bull shifted where he sat, looking around. Leaning in on his elbows with his hands clasped in front of him, he continued. “Tell me how you know, and she doesn’t. Explain that to me, Solas.”

“It was so early,” said Solas, throttled there on the table. Prideless. He finished the glass of whiskey in a single swallow, eyes glazed, he squeezed them shut, felt the burning in his chest, exhaled. “A couple of weeks. While visiting Sene in the Fade, I saw a girl passing through. She was mine. And she died.”

“Are you absolutely sure?”

Solas nodded, slow. “It was not imagined. I promise you that. And when Sene woke up, and she never knew, I just—I have not had a great deal of…courage, Bull. I could not bring myself to tell her. To cause her more pain, I—”

“Hey,” said Bull, reaching across the table, putting his hand on Solas’s jaw. He held him there, forcing his focus. “It’s okay. You don’t have to explain it to me, but you can’t keep this shit inside forever, Solas. It’s going to eat you alive.”

“I am aware of that,” said Solas, “now.”

Bull dropped his hand. “What are you going to do?”

Solas slid the empty glass to the wall. He spread his hands out and laid his forehead down on the table. “I am going to tell her,” he said, curling into himself. Deep inside his own body. Flexing. He felt Bull’s hand again, now a solid grip on his shoulder.

There were people, passing on all sides of them it seemed. Nobody saw. Or, if they did, they didn’t say anything. They forgot. They looked away. Men of battle are not easy creatures, as you may know. Trees fucked up in a lonely snowstorm. Half the time, they’re just debris.

 

After her meeting with Josephine, Sene attended several more meetings, the last of which was with two visiting Keepers from the Exalted Planes. In Crestwood, real negotiations had finally begun between the Inquisition and multiple Dalish clans of Ferelden and Orlais. But they had questions about Sene’s vallaslin. Incapable of lying, and having discussed the matter with Josephine to a ceaseless degree, Sene told them the truth. They were very interested in meeting Solas. Josephine promised to arrange something, but Sene was not sure. Too much had happened since their talk in Crestwood—about the pilgrimage, about what life would be like for them after all this was over. She could no longer guess how he felt. In some ways, she was hopeless.

Now, the day was getting on. Drawn to the snow, its majesty a comfort to her, Sene went for a walk, alone. The grounds had begun to clear due to the cold, but she liked it. She found Cole and Cassie, who both seemed to like it, too, sitting across from one another on the floor in the stables. They were playing with the nug named Pepper. Cassie was just a tiny, brunette woman in a heavy blue dress with a wide, round belly and a wool scarf. Cole was massive in comparison, hatless, a bright, hulking creature of sun, wearing his dark jacket.

“Sene,” said Cole, nug pressed to his chin. “You’re back. I think I missed you. Is that the right word?”    

“I missed you, too, Cole.” She smiled.

“Have you met Cassie?”

“No,” said Sene, taking a seat on the ground beside them. She wiped her hands off on her pants, held one out for her to take. “I’m Sene. It’s nice to meet you, Cassie.”

Cassie glanced at Cole, who nodded. “She is just a person,” he said. “You needn’t be frightened.”

So Cassie looked back at Sene, tugging her dress tight around her belly and straightening her posture. She bravely shook Sene’s hand. “You’re even prettier than they say, Your Worship.”

Sene blushed. “Please, just call me Sene.”

“Cassie is the woman that Solas saved,” said Cole.

Like a flash, Sene knew. She watched the woman shrink, deep into her brown knit sweater. “I’m so sorry,” said Sene. “I didn’t know it was you.”

“We needn’t speak of it,” said Cassie.

“Sene only wants to help,” said Cole. “That is what she does. She and Solas are the ones who made me whole again, so that I can help. She is good.”

“It’s all right,” said Sene. She put her hand on the small woman’s knee. “We don’t have to talk about it.”

Cassie seemed grateful for this. Then the nug crawled out of Cole’s arms and right into Cassie’s lap. “I would be pleased to talk about whatever,” she said, “with you, Lady Herald.”

Sene warmed to her, right away.

“Cassie,” said Cole. “This is the first time I’ve ever seen you without your book.”

Cassie glanced down at the nug. “Yes, well. I thought it was time,” she said.

“How is your baby?” said Sene, smiling.

Cassie exhaled, relieved to talk of something good. She scrubbed Pepper the nug beneath her chin. “He is strong,” she said. “He has the hiccups.”

“The hiccups?” said Sene. “How can you tell?”

“I can feel them,” she said.

“What do they feel like?”

“Just like hiccups, only on the inside. Little rhythmic flickers.”

“That’s amazing,” said Sene, eyes wide.

“Would you like to feel him kick, Lady Herald—I mean, would you, Sene?”

“Sure."

Cassie lifted the nug from her lap and handed it back to Cole. Then, she guided Sene’s hands all the way to the top of her belly. It was hard—harder than Sene had thought possible. And the shape of her uneven, almost lopsided. It took a moment of feeling to get it just right, but then, finally, Sene felt a foot, or an arm—something—sliding around beneath the surface. She gasped, looked at Cole, who started to laugh.

“He likes you,” said Cole.

“I can’t believe it,” said Sene, exhilarated. “Does he do that all day?”

“Specific times,” said Cassie. “He usually starts about now, then he’ll go on for half the night.”

“Is it hard to sleep?” said Sene.

“Sometimes,” said Cassie, “but not because of the baby.”

Sene put a few pieces of fallen hair behind her ears. She noticed then, the blue-jeweled ring on Cassie''s left hand. “Your ring is beautiful,” she said. “Andrastian?”

“Yes,” said Cassie, but she wouldn’t look at it. She hid her hands in the folds of her dress.

“Solas recovered it for her,” said Cole. The nug squeaked, “and her husband’s as well.”

“Your husband?” said Sene.

Cassie looked away. Sene’s mind had drawn a blank. For some reason, it had taken her a long time to put things together. All Solas’s report had said at Caer Bronach was that there was one dead on the scene, and one rescued. There had been no specifics, not like this. But she should have known. She felt foolish.

“I’m so sorry,” said Sene. “I didn’t realize.”

“Do not apologize, Lady Herald. It is because of you that I live at all.”

“You mean Solas,” said Sene, smiling.

“Same thing,” said Cassie. “He is a decent man.”

“Yes, he is.”

“Solas is at the bottom of a wishing well,” said Cole, the nug dozing against his chest. “He cannot climb out on his own.”

“What are you on about, Cole?” said Sene.

“He needs you,” said Cole. “He is not too proud anymore, just worried.”

“Worried about what?”

“About what you’ll think of him when you know. Solas likes things to appear orderly, because he is used to sacrifice. He never wanted any of this. Black hair that grows all the way down to the grass. Two pale feet in the snowy garden. They took her, and so he did what he was asked.” He said these things as if he were saying nothing at all. As if he were reciting a recipe, or a grocery list.

Sene, meanwhile, could not even tell if she was awake. Her view of the stables blurring at the edges, crinkled and stained. She could hear a man whistling outside, merchant chatter and lady's voices. And yet, she wasn’t sure what any of it could mean.

“Are you okay, Lady Herald?” said Cassie, taking Sene’s hand.

Sene looked down, once again taken by the finger, the blue stone. She nodded. “Of course,” she said, smiling as if nothing had ever happened, as if none of it were real, and she were merely a spectator. Boring, and dead, and free.

And when she got back to her room that night, after leaving Cassie and Cole in the stables to wait out the storm, she found him. A surprise, but was it? He was waiting, leaning against one of the windows, hands in his pockets, watching the snow, and when she closed the door, he turned around, and he smiled at her. He was so…Solas. Tall and poised there, just a little loose around the seams. She liked him that way. She didn’t want a man who was perfect, or manicured, or fully refined from all angles. She wanted him. Jagged and frustrating, like learning to swim upstream. She smiled, too.

“You’re back,” he said.

“I’m back,” she said. “Have you been here long?”

“Not long."

But then, something seemed off. Too much in his demeanor. “Is something wrong?” she said.

“No,” he said, very calm, serious, but still somehow gentle. “Or, yes. Come, sit with me.”

So she did. They sat down on the mat in front of the fire, facing one another. Solas was heavy, tense. He picked up her hands, kissed them with his eyes closed.

“What is it?” she said.

“There is a matter to discuss,” said Solas, looking at her, pouring his focus, just a little bit at a time. “It is very important.”

“What?” she said. “Solas, what?”

“Please listen,” he said softly, “and when you hear what it is I am about to tell you, please try and be calm. Okay?”

She waited. Everything was quiet. The wind now, with the coming storm—like many whistling ghosts at the windows, pounding their fists on the glass. Sene nodded, trusting. She waited, patiently, as she always did with Solas.

So, he began. “Do you remember what happened, at the Emprise du Lion?”

“Of course I do,” she said. “This is about the Emprise du Lion?”

“Yes,” he said, watching her, eyes still. “When you were injured, it was very bad,” he said. “I know we’ve talked about it, but never like this. You almost died. In my arms, you almost died. You lost a great deal of blood, and I hid you in the Fade, because the spirit I had to conjure to stop the bleeding was so powerful, the only way for it to work meant causing you a significant amount of pain.”

“The butterfly,” she said.

He nodded. “Yes. The butterfly.” He inhaled, renewed his grip on her hands. “While you slept, I would visit you often,” he said. “You lived in memories of your childhood. Shooting arrows into trees in the woods alongside the Minanter River. You were safe, and you were happy. But then, our first night back in Skyhold, I went to you there, and I saw something. I saw something, and it scared me. It scared me, Sene, so I awoke, and I—I read your energies. Again and again and again. And it always came out the same.”

“What did, Solas?” she said. “What came out the same?”

“This is what I have to tell you,” he said shaking his head again and again.

“Please, Solas. Please just tell me.”

“Sene," he said, looking at her.

“What?”

The words were like foreign objects in his mouth. It was like a piece of his chest had come loose, dislodged and now it just lie there, breathing on its own. “You were pregnant,” he said softly. “Sene. When the Shadow nearly killed you in Suledin Keep, you were pregnant, and then, you were not.” He was looking her in the eye now, full gray and mournful. “Do you understand?”

But she didn’t. Not at first. What she was hearing—it was nonsense. Like a bunch of birds bumping into each other inside her head. But still, her hands fell to her stomach on pure instinct, and it was with this touch that things—so many things—had started to materialize.

“Sene?” said Solas.

She felt his hand on her face, his thumb there at the corner of her eye. “How—? How could that be?” she said, searching his eyes. “I didn’t feel anything?” She looked down at her hands as if she’d forgotten something important. She tugged the shirt off of her skin, saw the hollow it made there. She thought of hiccups. She thought very suddenly that she might throw up.

“It was early,” said Solas, shaking his head. “A few weeks at most. Cole was very clear on that.”

“Cole?” she said, bearing into him now. “Cole knows?”

“Yes,” he said. “Do not blame him. I asked him not to tell you.”

“You _asked_ him?” she said. “Why didn’t _you_ tell me, Solas?”

“I tried to tell you,” he said. “I did, Sene. I just—I couldn’t figure out how.”

“I can’t—” She stopped, swallowed. “You couldn’t figure out how?”

“Sene—”

“When did you try?”

“After you woke up,” he said. “In the Hinterlands. In Crestwood, the second time. The belfry. In Val Royeaux. In Crestwood, the third time. There were hundreds of chances, and I missed every single one. I don’t know, Sene—I couldn’t bring myself to tell you. I just couldn’t. I’m so sorry.”

Thrashed, she got up off the floor, suddenly. She felt very done. Very much, entirely done. She didn’t know where to go or what to do, because everywhere she went, there would only be more people, and where there were people, there were always questions, and duties, and so she just got up, and she went to the balcony doors, because they were her doors, and she threw them open, both at once, and she burst out into the freezing air, sucking it in, like glass in her insides. The shock felt good, and the snowflakes were small and they stung her face like needles, and she could see her breath as she exhaled. She leaned against the railing and hung over the edge but it was too dark to see all the way to the bottom. It was too much. All at once. Like drowning. She screamed into the void.

It took him a long time to follow her. Because he knew her, and he understood her reaction and this, almost more than anything, killed her. And when he finally did come out, she glanced over her shoulder and he was so serious, so messed up, leaning against the door frame with his hands in his pockets. He stared at her, and he said, “Tell me what to do, Sene.”

The wind whipped her hair and knocked it free, and she shook her head. She turned around, held herself against the wind, staring at him through the frenzied snow. “Why do you do this?” she said. “Solas? Why do you do this?"

He closed his eyes, hung his head. He was expectant, almost obedient. He did not answer. He had been waiting for this. Almost hoping for it. He wanted her to scold him.

So she went on, and she felt like she was screaming, but in the snow, everything seemed louder than it actually was. “You force loneliness upon yourself. It’s almost like a form of punishment or something. But you’re not just punishing yourself, Solas. You’re punishing us both. _This_ ,” she said, her voice breaking. “This—this _loss_. It was _ours._ Not yours alone to bear. It’s no wonder you’re falling apart. Half of that grief was supposed to be mine. It belonged to _me._ But you just keep wedging more pain into your heart, where it does not fit and it does not belong, and now, I—I just—”

Her talking, it just fell off a cliff. She’d begun to cry, and it was choking her so hard she couldn’t do it anymore. Solas, meanwhile, was entirely dismantled there on the balcony. And when she sensed his submission fully, she went to him and she clutched to the back of his neck with both hands, and he held her wrists hard. But he still wouldn’t look at her.

“You can’t do everything by yourself, Solas,” she said. “Especially this. I can’t—We’re in this together. We _have_ to be. Don’t you see that?”

“Yes,” he said, finally. “I see.”

“Then why won’t you just open up to me? Let me in. What are you so afraid of?”

“I am not afraid,” he said. “I was. Back in Val Royeaux, all the times before that. I was terrified—of losing you mostly. Hurting you. But I’m not anymore. I just don’t know how to open up to you, Sene.” He shook his head over and over. “I do not know how. I just—I don’t understand.”

This baffled her. Her lips were cold and chapped, and she was so deeply aware of them as she pressed them to his. Solas, surprised, caught her face in his hands and held her there. Suspended in the snow. He had come out of nowhere, she thought, captured her, and blew her heart to smithereens. One million juicy fragments. And she loved him so desperately. Like murder. Like the end of something. They were just two dumb animals, curling up together into the back of a cave with their sorrow, and that was it.

“I’m really scared, Solas,” she said as they parted. She fell into him, arms around his waist as he held her. “Can we talk about it?"

“What are you scared of, Sene?”

“I’m scared that I’m all fucked up now.” She was still crying, but it was fading, sharp. “I know it's stupid, but that's all I can think about. That fucking Shadow. Did he break me? Am I broken?”

He put his face into her cool, wet hair. “You could never be broken, vhenan,” he said. “Not to me.”

“You know what I mean,” she said. “Tell me the truth.”

And somehow, as she collapsed there, he grew stronger. Their roles, switched. So easily. And he tilted her face up to meet his. She couldn’t tell if he’d been crying, or if it was just the cold and the snow. “You are not _broken_ ,” he said. “Even if you were, as you say, it wouldn’t matter. But you are not broken.”

“How do you know?”

“The same way I know everything, vhenan. I sense it. I know you better now than I ever have. I promise you, Sene. Everything is okay.” He closed his eyes, gathered himself. “There will be other chances. It will be okay.”

“Please don’t go tonight,” she said, putting her face into his chest. “Please stay.”

“I am not going anywhere, Sene,” he said. “But I would like us to go inside eventually. It’s freezing.”

“I like the cold,” she said, pressing her ear to his chest. She could hear his heartbeat, slow and big and even.

“I know you do,” he said.

 

It was not a great big leap then, not for Solas—to understand what he had to do next. Too much had happened. He could feel time stiffening against his fingertips. And when he closed his eyes, and he shifted his hands into the Veil, feeling its soft, the weakness and the fray, the holes, the sadness, black hearts frozen inside blocks of ice—the faces of the dead. He knew he had to preserve her. Because without her, there was nothing left, only sorrow.

It was morning. The snow had stopped, frozen in picture frames on the windows, and the sun was a fragile heat, coming through in pieces. He’d forgotten to draw the curtains closed the night before, when they both tipped back into the bedroom, changed into new clothes, new skins and new faces, dry things she just had lying around, and then he held her, fierce through the night as they slept. Beside him now, she was already awake, her eyes fixed hard on the ceiling. She had her hands clasped across her stomach as she worked something out in her airy, fast brain. He pushed the hair out of her face, kissed her cheekbone. “Breakfast?”

And she smiled like a piece of ribbon.

He wanted to get to the kitchens before the rest of them. The morning was just alive, and everything still smelled like snow. The crisp and the antlers, the chipped mug, as he took a detour through the garden, and he found the secret room—the one so few knew about in this castle. He turned the key in the lock on the door. Inside, there were stacked bookshelves, cobwebs stuck in quiet fashion, and he shook out the great, cotton tarp and pulled it off of the eluvian, revealing its candid glow and shifting physique. He put his hand on the surface, felt a familiar thrumming, and he closed his eyes, and when he came out the other side—somewhere deep in the crossroads where the sky was just a war of purple ships, she was already there, waiting for him. Only it was not in any form we would recognize. Not here. Solas alone knew this face. Abelas, perhaps, but nobody could say for sure. For she wore many masks. But this version of her was both stark and mild, rigid with the ears singing high off her head. Gold leaf, winter. Hair of brown, eyes of black, all piled into one another like morning on the storm-fucked sea, and she smiled at him. Rich and red-lipped and a beauty so cold. She was cinders. She wore a white dress with long, white sleeves.

“Hello, Mythal,” he said, hands deep in his pockets, studying the enter and the exit of her face.

“Hello, Fen'Harel.”


	32. Crossroads

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where is Solas? See: Title

After he left, Sene stayed very still. Her body felt long and loose, and she counted the windows in the wall, and she made a note of the snow—like a weird crust, frozen to the glass in some form of implied permanence. She thought of the negative space in between, and what it might feel like to die in an avalanche. Of course, according to some, she already had.

She was very tired. In the night, she had woken what seemed like thousands of times, struck with the fear that Solas had somehow stopped breathing beside her, that she would turn over in the bedsheets and find him there, dead. It was not a dream. It made no sense. But it was terrifying, just this heavy, unrelenting anxiety that gnawed at her insides all night, and she wondered now if Solas had slept at all, as she remembered that every time she jerked awake off her pillow, he somehow caught her, as if he knew she was coming, and he brought her into him, his body hard and broad and warm and alive, and he put his face into her hair, and he whispered, _Ame amahn. Ame amahn, vhenan._ His hot breath on her skin. It had been so long since they’d spoken in the language, the comfort was enough to put her back into dreaming every time. How she’d missed him.

She remembered finally drifting hard right before dawn. The snow had stopped, and the light coming through the frozen windows was purple. A deep, dreamless sleep. Then, she woke up before him, which was typical, tired, and the anxiety waning with the passage of time, but she was unable to process herself back into sleep. She fussed with the hem of her shirt instead and thought about the future, and then, as he slept, a new anxiety took hold. The anxiety that one or both of them would die before they got there—to the place in her mind where they were finally settled, and happy, and free. Where they could live away from danger and in some form of relative peace, and Sene had never been the type to settle or to even consider staying in a single place for too long, but now, after everything that had happened, things had changed. She’d been taking it for granted all this time, she realized, that they would just…be okay. She could feel the stupidity of her youth, creeping from all angles. But she was not a child anymore. She didn't feel like a child.

And this made her worry in other ways, most notably that, eventually, one day, even if they did make it, and they did somehow survive all of this, he would tire of her, that he would want somebody else. Somebody more sophisticated. Somebody with smoother hair, better control. It seemed impossible now, but how was she supposed to know? She had never been in love before Solas. She did not understand how two people in love could fall out of love. The process was inconceivable to her, though she knew it happened all the time. Would this happen to them? Could it? She thought of her mother walking amongst the rose bushes, holding out her hands and pricking them on the thorns on purpose. This was not a behavior Sene hoped to inherit. But what if she did? Her mother had lost a child, and then she lost contact with the world. But still, she seemed to love Sene’s father, no matter how big of an asshole he might have seemed. Sene knew that what had happened to her was not the same thing that had happened to her mother, not by a long shot, but she could not help but feel sorry for her mother now because of it, and miss her mother, and wish she could be back in their camp outside of Ansburg just to say hello to her mother and to remind her that she, Isene, still existed. There was still one daughter left. She was too tall and she had the hot temper, and a lot of really bad things were happening to her lately, but this was only one small piece of her life. There were other pieces, too. Better pieces. The shiny kind. Like Solas. Right?

For the most part, Sene was doing just fine. She was impulsive and severe, and she had come very close to death several times, and she did not trust the power she had come to wield, and the world was ending, and possibly her boyfriend was having some sort of mental breakdown, and the two of them had endured more hardship than she thought either of them deserved, but she was okay.

She would be okay.

When he had gone, and she sat up finally, her hair felt very big and very dry. The ends were split. She went to the hope chest, rummaged around until she found her brush, but the little teak box of hairpins was empty, and she sighed. She went to the table on his side of the bed, opened the drawer. She had never once opened Solas's drawer, but she thought he might be stashing some of them in there, the pins, and she was right. She found a small handful in a little satin bag, and the drawer was very organized. A stack of letters, a blue feathered quill. The letters were addressed to the both of them, and so she took them out to see. More correspondence, diplomacy. An effusive thank you from the Berrandes that ended on yet another invitation: _The Comte and I invite you and your warrior to dine with us the moment you return to Val Royeaux. Just have Lady Montilyet send a note, and we are yours to detain. Yours fruitfully, and in the Hour of Our Most Joyous Affection, Comtesse Leticia Berrande and the Comte._ Sene laughed at this, how the _Comte_ was worthy only of his title. She then read Solas’s response, which was pithy and charming, fairly typical, she thought. It oddly warmed her though to see his handwriting this way. She had never seen it at such length before—only in bits and pieces in the margins of books. The long, slanted cursive letters. Old-fashioned, but rushed, something brute about it. The party in Val Royeaux seemed ages ago by now. Solas in his silver tux, leaning against a pillar, handing her a glass of champagne. So tall for an elf. So very tall.

As she replaced the stack of letters in the drawer, she noticed something else inside, shoved way in the back, neatly folded in a thin square of worn leather. It was his pendant—the wolf’s jaw. She tried to remember the last time she’d seen him wear it, but she couldn’t. At some point, he’d wrapped it in leather and put it away. A deliberate act, and she wondered what it could mean. She took it out of the leather and studied it closely. The bone worn, a relic, but it looked preserved, probably with magic. She pressed a finger into the dull surface of each tooth, and then she set it on the desk, and she made the bed, and she changed her clothes, and she pulled the brush through her tangled hair, and she pinned the hair off her face, and she went downstairs to the guard posted at the door, because for once, she felt like doing her job.

“Send for Lady Montilyet, and have her bring Thom Rainier,” she said. The guard nodded and went straight away. Another guard came to take his place. Sene went back upstairs and sat at her desk, hands folded in front of her, and she tried to feel important, but of course, she did not. She felt stupid. So she just sighed and gazed at the piece of bone instead—the jaw—and she thought of that time Solas had laid her down right there on that very same desk, and she held onto it—the jaw, and he held her hand, and he claimed her, and he lost himself inside her, like really lost himself, for the very first time. Had she seen him wear it since? Or was that the moment? She had not thought about that day in forever. That morning they road for Halamshiral, and yes, now that she thought of it, they did start to feel more serious after that. It would have only been a few short weeks before the Emprise du Lion, and so she wondered. Struck with both fear and curiosity, she held her hand out over the jaw, let it hover there. She closed her eyes, pretending.

 _A few weeks at most,_ he’d said. She supposed it could have been true. That it happened, right here in the morning sun. And then he put away the jaw, and he did not wear it again, and she became pregnant, though she did not know it. But maybe subconsciously, she did know. And he knew, too. Or maybe it really was all one big coincidence. In any case, it comforted her greatly to imagine it happening here, in Skyhold. Though the desk was not a typical surface for them, it was interesting. Memorable. They’d never done it on the desk again, so it was sacred, too. If this was where it had happened, then she was happy. So she opened her eyes, and just like she’d done a million times that morning, she reassured herself that it was all going to be okay, and for the moment, she felt like maybe it really was.

 

Meanwhile.

“Hello, Fen'Harel _,_ ” said Mythal to the Wolf.

He presented himself without amusement. He had to. This, what he was about to do, would not be an easy task. “It has been a while,” he said, firm.

“Yes, it has.”

“I assume you've been expecting me."

“Hands in your pockets,” she said, clicking her tongue three times. “That is how we know the Wolf has positioned his guard. Whose move? Yours or mine.”

He sighed. “Speak sanely, Mythal,” he said, feeling very tired all of a sudden. “Please. I do not have time for your flowersome bullshit. I came here to talk. Will you hear me?”

“I have been listening for 8,000 years, Fen’Harel. You’ve only just spoken _to_ me today. Or, it’s been a while. I forget.”

“That is not how it happened.”

“Please tell me why you’re here.”

“Flemeth,” said Solas, staring hard into her bright, wide open face. “She's been interfering in my affairs.”

"Interesting choice of words.”

He did not speak.

“Your girl is very young,” said Mythal, her high voice, as a song. “A teenager? And you got her pregnant. Oh, Fen’Harel. You truly are a youthful god.”

“That my own personal tragedy would bring you any form of amusement makes me frightened at the woman you’ve become, Mythal,” he said, taking his hands out of his pockets, picking at the ends of his sleeves. “I did not come here to get angry.”

“Then what did you come here for?” said Mythal. “Merely to confront me on the matter of spywork? Of course I’ve been watching you. What else is there for me to do? All I have is Flemeth, and our stupid mirrors, and even they escape me at times. Your quick children, as much as I love them—and I do—have grown meddlesome over the years. I know you feel the same.”

"You tipped your hand in Crestwood,” he said. “Allowing Flemeth to show herself. You wanted me to come here.”

“Quit fussing with your sleeves. Look at me.”

He clenched, obeyed, glared. She wanted to get a rise out of him. “I came here because I have two things to tell you, Mythal. And then, I must go.”

“Two things,” she said.

“The first begins with Flemeth.” He dropped his hands back into his pockets. He felt a stray hairpin, floating around inside. “I am no longer the entertainment around here,” he said. “I have not been the entertainment for many years. I’ll admit that once, I craved the attention. But that was a younger man. That was not me.”

“Is that not the man I saw in Val Royeaux? It was so familiar.”

He plucked the pin, set it between his teeth. “Do not mistake talent for passion, Mythal. You know better.”

”You would not have always said as much.”

”Maybe not.” 

She raised her eyebrows, annoyed. “What is the second _thing_ you have come here to tell me?”

“That I will not be dismantling the Veil,” he said. “I now know you’ve been spying on me. I know your agenda. But it simply will not happen.”

“You are chewing things again,” she said, studying his mouth. “Stress. This replaces the smoking.”

“I smoked as a means of dazing my reality. I no longer wish to do that.”

"Well, that makes one of us.”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“I did,” she said. “Why did you come here to tell me this?”

“Because I know you,” he said, taking one step toward her, holding her to the earth with his focus, the pin clicking around in his teeth. “You are angry with me for imprisoning our friends. For each day that they lie sealed beyond your reach, your murderers escape the wrath of Justice. Am I wrong?”

“You speak so bluntly,” she said. “You know so little. You know nothing of my heart, and what I desire. I am a leave in decay. Or perhaps I’m just the fucking decay. You say these things, even in the memory of Ghilan’nain.”

“Ghilan’nain betrayed me, because she was weak.”

“You haven't always felt that way,” said Mythal. “You loved her, too. Remember? Just like me.”

“I remember everything,” said Solas, his voice deep and echoing through that dusted nothing place. “Every last yellow hair on her head, vibrating as I put her into the darkness for good. This is not about Ghilan’nain, and it never has been.”

"So that's it then?” she said finally, closing the space between them. “You just come to me now, throwing your  _decision_ in my face as if I’ve the slightest trinket of recourse. Are you so ungrateful?”

“Ungrateful?” he said. This caught him, dead surprise. Incredulous. “I ended an entire world for you.”

“That was not for me."

“Then who was it for?”

She said nothing.

“You have a look of jealousy about you, Mythal. I know it all too well. You spy on me through your picture glass, and you taunt the woman I love. Is this why? You are jealous? Just tell me. Try to see reason.”

“What if I am?” she said. “You belonged to me, before.”

“That, I did," said Solas. "But you forgot too much. The years have been cruel. I am so sorry, Mythal. Do not force me to remind you how you used my mother’s life as a bargaining chip to get what you wanted in the beginning. I loved you, when I was man enough to love you, but do not pretend that what we had was innocent.”

“I kept her safe,” she said, her voice getting big out there. Somewhere, a thing yelped in response. A bird, a coyote, a ghost. “I protected her. She was my friend. It is because of me that she stayed alive for as long as she did.”

“That is all true, but it does not change the truth of what happened.”

“You chose to come to me that day, Solas,” she said. “You chose.”

He took the pin out of his mouth, tossed it to the earth. “A choice is not a choice unless it is freely taken,” he said. “Her life was in the balance. I had no choice.”

“You were never my slave. Not you, not Sorrow, none of you. I never compelled you. Never.”

“It doesn't matter,” he said. “What happened is past. I have lost Abelas. He is in the wind. And the way we talk now, it makes no sense. I don't know you. You are not the woman I remember. Too much time has passed. I will always be thankful, for how you treated my mother in the end. You were once, in your nature, a compassionate woman. But the years have been kind to neither of us.”

“We speak of Abelas with such abandon,” she said. “Have you no knowledge, Solas? He lusts after your girl. Watches her from the treetops. Pictures that mound of red hair as he pleasures himself in the dark. Sorrow and Fire make smoke, don’t they, Solas?”

“You are not this cruel,” said Solas. “Nor are you this stupid. You know me better than to believe I’d find myself threatened by such mundane accusations. So, he lusts. That is what men do.”

“Men like you?”

“Yes. Men like me.”

“Tell me, Fen’Harel,” she said, pacing now. An old-fashioned gesture. Two black birds flew out of her brown hair and disappeared into the upturned sky. “How do you plan to sustain this world of men when the Veil itself is crumbling? I love it as much as you do. In fact, I loved it first. You once hated this world.”

“None of this is your concern,” said Solas. “The Veil is mine. Its fate is mine to determine.”

“You should not have given your orb to Corypheus, Fen’Harel,” she said, stopping in front of him, looking pained. “At this point, the Veil would be easier to lift than to sustain. You do not have the power to accomplish all that you seek.”

“I’ll get it,” he said.

“Oh, will you? Such pride, as usual. And how will you get your power, Solas? Leech it from your lover’s fingertips? And if that is, indeed, the case, when do you plan to tell her the truth. The whole truth. About who you are.”

He flexed his jaw, narrowed his eyes. “You would destroy this for me,” he said. “Would you, truly?”

This now—this hurt her, brought her to the surface. He could see it. She was dumbstruck, frozen. Her dress turned blue. She softened before his very eyes. “What do you mean?" she said.

“You see how much I care for her,” he said, quiet, “and yet you mock my devotion. You toy with our happiness. Do you not wish to see me cared for?”

“Of course I do. I always have.”

“After everything I’ve done,” he went on, looking at his hands. “Worlds destroyed in your honor. My hands covered in blood. Years spent in your servitude, acting on your behalf. You loved me. You took me into your world, and you gave me a purpose.” He stole her eyes, buried them with his own. Their incredible blackness. “Don't you remember? Many saw me as heartless during our Great War, did they not? I assumed that role. It is for this very reason that you needed me. And I understand that, and I do not hold it against you. But after my mother was gone, and after you were gone, and after the Veil, it became the truth. My heart was destroyed. I was alone, powerless, left dragging its mangled pieces in a sack behind me up a very steep hill. It hurt so much in the afterglow, that yes, I hated this world, what it had become in my absence, and I made my plans. I tried in failure to keep them. But then I met Sene, and she seemed to know what to do, and she took those bloody pieces and she reassembled them inside my hollow chest without a single question, and I rang out. I lived again. I changed my mind, and the process of doing so almost drove me mad. Still, she stayed. _She_ is what I’ve been searching for, Mythal. Are you now so shallow that you do not see what is right in front of you?”

“I am sorry for this, Fen’Harel,” she said, shaking her lovely head. “For your broken heart, your dispossessed memories. I wish you did not think these things of me.”

“It is not about you,” he said to her, losing his grip. “With Sene, I am just Solas. I have not been Solas in a very long time. Not since you. I have missed him. I am learning, remembering, that he was a good man.”

“You _are_ a good man.”

“Perhaps I am not the man you thought I was,” he said, shaking his head at her. “It is for that reason, that I cannot help you this time, because I know that is why you really brought me here. To ask for my help. But I am not him. I am sorry.”

At first, she did not speak, and in truth, he did not blame her, not for any of this. She had carried them all. And he had always been the one she loved the most. She reached out to him. She put her small, bird’s hand into his. The other, she placed on his cheek. Cold and forgiving, a lullaby in skin. Her touch sadly familiar, so far away and yet drawing every piece of him backward until he felt himself lift his chin in familiar fashion, and wait. She was small, much smaller than Sene. With Sene, things were untidy and frizzed and full of colors and physical grace. Musculature and heat. He could almost taste her, right then, she was so present. All the time. With Mythal, everything was sleek and sharp, polished, distant, the dark hair smooth as oil down her back, the magic coming off of her in a wintry humming. That day, the whites of her eyes turned to ice as she cried. She had succumbed to the rage of her magic long ago. “If this is how you truly feel,” she said to him, “then I must warn you that it is now or never, Fen’Harel.”

He heard her, he did. But he was exploring now, trying to remember. Lonely inside her, like before. Like the catch of a hook at the end of a very long line. He listened, because she'd been important to him once. But the memories, he felt, were freezing now, ice and salt water flooding him hard. He had to dam his heart. He did not like to do that, not anymore, but if he didn’t, he would go down with them. Ten thousand feet to the trembling underbelly of his fucked-up life. Pick it up, Solas. Set it free. He shook his head, and in an instant, removed himself. And he removed her hand from his cheek and set it down by her side. “What do you mean, Mythal.”

“The telling,” she said, smiling, resigned now, fragile in the way of a tired mother as she took a step backward. Her cheeks a dull red ravage, dejected and lost. But for a moment, she seemed lucid again. She seemed like her. “The truth. Things are changing, quickly, Solas. Your Veil has more consequences than you realize. I know you do not see it now, but you will soon. I may not like it, but she has found your relic, and now, she waits. I am sorry for what I said to you earlier. I know that the pain of your loss, and hers, must ache deeply. It is a sadness that I would wish upon no woman, no matter who she is. Of course, yours is braver than most. Knowing you, I still don’t know why I’m so surprised.”

In a shudder then, tears shiny on her embered cheeks, she was gone. Broken into the wings of a thousand reptilian birds. They flew off. Then, silence.          

Solas, weathered and bare, let go of his breath, finally, one piece at a time. He closed his eyes, fell forward with his hands on his knees, gasped. He thought he might lose his guts in the grass. He shook her out violently after that, beat the heel of his palm into his ear. One last time. The crossroads were everywhere. All around him. Left and right, up and down. Half the exits were broken. But this, he realized, was relief. He heaved the air into his lungs, huge gulps of it, and then, when he was ready, he went through the eluvian, back to Skyhold.

Out in the garden, he saw Kieran waving at him from not so far away. He’d been packing a light snowball. The image brought Solas back to earth.

“Hello, Mr. Solas,” called the dark-haired child in his long, blue jacket and red knit scarf. There were other people, too. The Chantry sisters holding their candles. Young soldiers shoveling the stairs and the walkways.

Solas waved back. It was quite cold. “Hello, Kieran.”

“All the worms have died,” said the boy. “Do you have any advice?”

“Not really,” said Solas, hands back in his pockets, this time for warmth. “Only that there’s nothing to worry about. They’ll be back in the spring." Then, "Would you like to help me with something this morning, Kieran?”

The boy smiled big and ran over. "Yes, I would very much," he said. "Will there be magic?"

Solas shook his head. "No magic," he said, smiling. "This is much too important for magic. We use our hands."

 

In her quarters now, Sene was sith Sera. Finally. The two sat on the couch, the hearth roaring big and warm. Crackling. They were using scissors to cut white paper into the shapes of snowflakes. Sera had come up with Thom and Josephine, then stayed behind after the pardon was complete. Sene told her about the vallaslin, and she told her about the miscarriage, too, and that things were okay with Solas, even if they were a little broken, and that he had gone to get breakfast, but she knew he was particular, and he had probably run into somebody and started a conversation anyway, and he would be back soon. She told it all so quickly. She did not stop once, hardly even to breathe. She needed to be out with it, and she had been so afraid before, to talk to Sera. She didn’t know why, but now, everything seemed different. Sera wanted to cry in the end, but she just pulled Sene into a great big hug instead. “Piss it,” she said, sniffling. “Shite. Sweet fuck, Sene. You’re just one elf. You shouldn’t have to _hurt_ like this.”

Sene agreed. But she was glad not to be alone.

When Solas returned, he was not alone either. He had Kieran along with him, who held a little tray of breakfast things, and Solas, a pot of coffee. He apologized for how long the morning had taken him. But Sene didn’t mind. “I got work done,” she said.

“That is good,” said Solas, watching her warm mouth, her freckled cheeks as she spoke.

“Hello, Inquisitor,” said Kieran.

“Hello, Kieran,” said Sene.

“Have the two of you met?” said Solas.

“Yes,” said Kieran. “Right when she arrived yesterday morning. With my mother.”

“We are old friends, you see,” said Sene.

Sera stood up off the couch, a little bashful seeming. She stuck her tongue out at the boy who stuck his tongue out right back. “You!” she said. Then she looked at Solas.

Solas waited. Standing there, holding that pot of coffee. He could tell something had been going on in that room. Some sort of talking. Straw girl and apple. Sera glared. “Sera,” he said, worried now. “How is Dagna.”

“Good and right,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “A rose on your nose for asking.”

“I am sorry,” he said. He shook his head, watching Sene discreetly. Sene just waited, and so did Kieran. "I am sorry, Sera."

“Sorry for what,” she said.

“For leaving Crestwood without saying goodbye,” said Solas. “I know that I probably hurt your feelings when I did that.”

“My feelings are just fine, elven man,” she said, but then she blushed, and she rushed him and hugged him tight. He almost lost hold of that coffee pot. Sera, like Sene, was very strong. She said to him then, in a whisper, “You almost fucking died, you git."

She smelled like lemons. He said, “I did not almost die. And watch your language, Sera. There is a child here.”

“Oh, I’ve heard much worse,” said Kieran, smiling up at the two of them.

Sera smiled, released Solas. “Of course you have, little weird one.” Then she looked back at Sene. “I’ll be going,” she said. “Got _things_ to do.” She looked at Kieran. “Right? More cookies, yeah?”

“Yes, please,” said the boy. Then he looked at Sene. “Here, Inquisitor. These little thingies are for you. There are rose cakes, and these are strawberry.”

“Thank you, Kieran,” said Sene, taking the tray from his hands. She brought it over to the desk.

Solas looked at Sera. “Tell Dagna we say hello,” he said.

She shoved him once. “I will.” And then she said goodbye to Sene, and she told her she loved her, and she left, holding the door for Kieran, squawking loudly in a voice that made them both laugh, and then the door was shut, and Sene was over by the desk, her hair half up and half down, sprung to life and somehow extra red that morning. She put a finger to one of the little cakes, licked it.

They had a bit of breakfast while sitting next to each other on the couch. Sene told him of Thom’s pardon, though she said very little of the details. “He was…emotional,” she said, demure, sipping her coffee. “You should talk to him. I know you guys play cards.”

“I will,” said Solas.

“I found something of yours,” she said then, reaching behind her—the little table by the couch. She handed him the jaw. “I didn't mean it. I was looking for hairpins in your drawer.”

He held it, cautiously, let the little piece of leather drop to the floor. His knuckles bare and healed. The scars pale and a shiny pink.

“You stopped wearing it,” she said, reaching down to set her mug on the floor. “Rather abruptly. Why?”

He looked at her, just the whisper of her there. Red. “It is a reminder,” he said, swallowing hard the thing that lumped in his throat. He felt out of breath and yet, emptied. Free. “I did not wish to be reminded.”

“What does it remind you of?” she said, soft.

And he knew by the look on her face then that she was earnest. That she would forgive him anything. It didn’t matter anymore. It was all just smoke. “My mother,” he said, looking back to the jaw.

“Your mother?” said Sene.

“She gave this to me,” said Solas, “as a gift many years ago. I was not even your age.”

“Why the wolf?” she said.

“Because it was a nickname,” he said, smiling down at the thing. “The Wolf. Given to me by others. But she said that this way, I could reclaim it for myself.”

Sene smiled, too. She moved closer to him. “How’d you earn that name?” she said. “The Wolf.”

“In the boxing ring, actually,” he said.

“The boxing ring?”

“Yes. When I was a teenager, I boxed. Bare knuckles. I was quite good.”

“You were?”

He smirked, nodded. He liked impressing Sene. It felt good.

“That explains a lot actually,” she said.                    

“I’m sure it does.”

“Was there a reason?” she said. “You just liked it?”

“I didn’t dislike it,” said Solas. “I was young. But I didn’t do it because I liked it. I did it because we were poor, and it was easy for me. I did it for the money. I did a lot of things for money back then.”

“What else?”

He sighed, he took her hand into his. “I did magic tricks on street corners." He kissed her knuckles, set the relic down on the couch between them. "I gambled. I played cards. A lot of cards.”

“Your mother could not work, could she?” said Sene.

“We have that in common, you and I,” he said. “And no, she could not work. She was a gifted healer, but after my father died, she lost her will to endure life outside the confines of our home.”

“I didn’t know your father was dead,” said Sene.

“He died when I was nine,” said Solas.

“I’m so sorry. You know you could have told me, Solas. You can tell me these things.”

“I know that now.”

“What did he do?" she said. "What was his job, when he was still alive?”

Solas cleared his throat. “He was an architect,” he said. “And an arcanist. He built houses. Special houses.”

“He built houses?”

Solas nodded. “Yes, he did.”

“That’s so neat,” said Sene. “Did he build your house?”

“Yes, he did.”

She got quiet then, staring at him. “I wish I could meet him,” she said finally. “How did he die?”

“He was struck by a piece of shrapnel,” said Solas, one hand holding hers and the other up at his throat. “Here. An explosion, during one of our many wars. He was not a fighter. Not like we are. He was a builder. He joined the fight to build the barracks for the soldiers. One night, an enemy combatant infiltrated the barracks where he’d been living at the time and rigged it with a kind of explosive ice mine. You’ve never seen such a thing as this, Isene. It went off. Everyone in the camp died. Including my father.”

She watched, waited. Outside, you could hear the wind on the windows but it was gentle. The sun was bright, the storm past. Unnerved and staggered, emptied and sad, Sene looked almost confused, but she was a warrior, and he knew that, in the end, she understood. “That's terrible, Solas,” she said. “You were so little. It’s not fair that he had to die like that.”

“Many things are not fair,” he said. “We survived.”

She fell into him then and hugged him hard. Just like that. He hugged her back. “That’s why you took it off?” she said. “The jaw. Because it reminded you of all this?”

They let go. He put the red hair behind her ears, found the warm light in the back of her green eyes. Held on tight. “No,” he said. “Not really. There is much more to this story, vhenan. I want to tell you. I’m just not sure how.”

“Just tell me,” she said, pressing her palms to his cheeks. They were worn hands, rough hands, always in use. “I won’t judge you. I will just listen. I promise, Solas. I promise.”

He watched her, felt her hands slide from his cheeks, down his neck, to his shoulders. Her familiar touch. Strong and real, like fire. His _a_ _vise'ain._ It had been so long since he'd called her that. He very much wanted to. Tilting his head now, he studied. The freckles, her pretty face. He reached to drag his fingers through her hair, felt the red, curly ends like paper. Dry and perfect. “Okay,” he said to her then, almost like a question, but not really.

“Okay?” she said.

Her hair, a power source. Her body, incentive. But these things were inessential. It was the rest that he needed from her now. “Okay.” He nodded once, holding her eyes, exhaled.

The dam has broken. It is now or never, Fen’Harel.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: If you have not already, now would be a very good time for you to read a bit of [Teen Wolf](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8623606/chapters/19773958)—my very new and very ongoing collection of teency stories that chronicle Solas as a teenager living outside Arlathan. 
> 
> (Just a suggestion, for maximum Solas feels, as well as a bit more with his mother and Ghilan'nain.) <3
> 
> Elven Translations:
> 
> "Ame amahn." - "I'm here."


	33. The Architect

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> To experience life can be confusing when you live forever.
> 
> Solas takes Sene to the Fade.

She’d known his father even before the First War, when she was a girl, and he was her family’s favorite architect. He’d designed and built the belltower of their castle, and he built her aviary, too, and several of her dollhouses. Though she no longer dared remember his name, he’d been a well-known engineer in Arlathan, and a man of many subtleties. They’d never spoken, but he’d smiled in her direction once or twice as she played in the halls, and he was so remarkable at his job, and just very interesting to look at—she would never forget him. He had huge hands. Big as stars. Violet eyes. He was tall and broad, born bald as few men were in those days, and his wife was a tiny woman of high birth named Leanathy who’d sometimes bring him snacks in the evenings. She’d resigned her nobility to marry him—a true romantic, and a scandal—and together, they lived outside the city in a rural district called the Weathers with their baby son named Solas.

When the First War broke out, Mythal was nineteen. Generations became, and the first true powers were chosen in Elvhenan. Her name was a new fixture in the political circles of Arlathan, and her family, old and feared, had been among the bloodiest warring factions. Mythal’s parents, mysterious, royal and elusive creatures that they were, gave her a life of wealth and library spires, and they raised her to be fiercely combative and independent. To need no one but herself. She was an only child. Of course, her mind was a hellscape for birds and serpents. She saw things. Heard voices. But she was elegant, good at being rich, and very bright, and she kept it all a secret, and before the war, she rarely went with men or women, as her body was a mistress of the sword. Nobody ever got close enough to Mythal to really know her insides. At least not for a while.

Years after the dust had settled, and she had secured her name and her royal standing, she saw a man who she believed to be the architect from her youth in the city. But this wasn’t him. The person she saw was much too young to be him, and in any case, she’d heard the architect had died—blown up in a fluke attack somewhere to the south where the fighting was supposed to be minimal. A terrible tragedy, by her own estimation, but she realized quickly that this boy she'd seen in the city must have been his son. Solas. There was no other explanation. She’d heard of his little magics, and how he spent much of his days setting butterflies loose in the city streets for pennies. He looked exactly like his father. The tall man who’d guided the hand of a noble girl and lead her to the fringe, and then died in a war he knew little about. What it must have been like, thought Mythal, the love of a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, even if only for a little while.

She was way high up in a building when she saw him, beyond the Great Gate, and she watched him as he watched the trains go by. Sitting on the roof of an abandoned streetcar with a plain but pretty girl, the yellow hair braided off her head like a rope. They shared a joint of elfroot and seemed to talk as if nothing mattered, legs dangling in the air. He was probably eighteen years old by then. It was several weeks later that she finally learned of his reputation— _the Wolf_. He was unassuming, like his father, but unlike his father, he was thirsty. He was rebellious. And unbeatable in the boxing ring. He’d lost only one match in the past year, and most people said he’d lost on purpose. That he’d got bored of winning. Threw the fight in order to see life from the other side for once. This, all of this, intrigued her. The girl, his childhood friend who sat beside him on the streetcar, she was just a nobody back then. The daughter of a blacksmith and a wedding planner—humble brat from the Weathers named Ghilan’nain. Mythal envied them their freedom that day. And yet, she enjoyed it immensely.

How the architect’s son came to belong to Mythal is not her story to tell. It is his. But she had a right to her memories. Of this, she was sure now, as she sat in her narrow winter window, watching him vibrate without her, far away. He was so certain now. Calm and grown. He wanted for so little. In fact, he wanted just one thing. His redhead. Tall and brave. He wanted her between the sheets, and under the bells. He wanted her inside the walls of his old fortress in the sky, and he wanted her beside the pools and rivers of the earth, beneath tall, tall trees. He wanted her in stupid, boring, nothing moments in which she laughed, and he laughed, and together, they laughed their way through a colorful and tactile existence like it belonged to them alone. He wanted to put a child inside her, several in fact, and to raise his family in a small house in a place like the Weathers where he could build a fence and grow a garden. He wanted to be his father, the architect. And he wanted to be simple and free and to build a life without complication, in which he, a man, loved a woman, and they, as lovers, lived.

 _Who wouldn’t want all that?_ thought Mythal as she sipped her very black tea from her very pale cup. _It is a lovely story._ Why was there never a choice?

She remembered when he was young in her army, at the very start of the Great War. Maybe twenty. A tactician, as well as her personal bodyguard, he would not be built to General for several years. Still too brash, too angry, cultivating his discipline, but he could kill men with his bare hands, and this was a rare quality. The stories of his at once stern and explosive demeanor had spread quickly through Arlathan. One night, Andruil in all of her white hair and fucked-up rambling as the three of them dined alone in her palace, made the mistake of referring to him as Mythal's _attack dog_. Solas had a lot of pride. It was one of his defining features.

"Would the _attack dog_ like some more?” she said about halfway through dinner, fork to plate, her hair coming off her head in cold spindles.

Mythal, raising her chin in amusement, said nothing, merely waited. He laughed, of course. Devastating in his charm as he was wont to be. He knew the stories. But then he was stone-faced, and he stood very quickly, and he picked up the table and flipped it over on top of Andruil, pinning her to the floor.

She was apoplectic.

“Tempt me,” he said. He lit a joint from his pocket—rolled perfectly to his specifications—with the delicate flame of one of his butterflies, and he leaned against the mantle, smoking, the pretty insect perched on his shoulder as he watched, closely, the entire time that it took Andruil to dig her way out from under that heavy, heavy table and their dinner where it heaped in stinking piles. The servants were terrified specters in the corners. Mythal, in her long, white dress had not moved from her chair. When Andruil finally got to her feet, he smirked.

She approached him. “What are you grinning at, dog?” she said.

He released the smoke from the corner of his mouth. “You,” he said, and then he raised his eyebrows, and he flicked the joint into the fire, and after telling Mythal to gather her shit and call for the horses, he and his butterfly casually left the room.

Once he was gone, Andruil turned to Mythal. She was big and mean and beautiful. She was like an axe. Her palace was like a forest. The walls were made of trees. The ceiling was just the sky, burned up and hollow. “Next time, bring a leash,” she said, spitting, as she worked a purple stain from the hem of her dress. “Or I’ll leash him for you.”

“One cannot put a leash on a wolf, Andruil,” said Mythal, demure, as she’d always been taught to be. “You will see.”

Where she lived now, it was high up in a tower. He’d built this place for her, special, many years ago. Her own small corner of the Fade. He gave her a window to the world, something to look through, so that she could watch his children grow and thrive and make something of themselves. She grew to love them, as other than Fen’Harel, their stories were all she had now. At this point, she held few attachments to the world before. Most of her memories were corrupted, misshapen, or faded entirely. She had, at some point, convinced herself, after a long time of being dead to existence, that she had probably never loved her parents, and they probably had never loved her. She had built herself to a goddess before she’d ever had the chance to harden into the shape of a woman, and her desires were all twisted because of it. She was full of envy, but she was full of gratitude. Her madness growing deeper with each passing century. She could feel it, spreading. Like a blight.

So, when he awoke once more, and he turned up in his body, walking around with his feet on the hard soil, she wondered if he missed her. He’d been away for so long, exploring dreams and memories lost to creation, all alone. She could feel his sadness still. Like a silvery knife, slowly cutting into her. In the world before, it had been hard times for Solas. It had always been hard times for Solas. Like when his mother, the ruined widow of the Weathers died in a well of her own sadness, way high up in Mythal’s palace in the trees, and he, a young man of twenty-four, watched her go, a little more every day, absorbing her sorrow and processing it as his own, for a year. Mythal had spent a lot of time holding Leanathy's hand in those final weeks, telling her things she remembered about the architect, little things from her childhood.

“I was afraid of him,” laughed Mythal one night. Solas was out. She thought he was probably with Ghilan’nain. The two still managed to find each other, to steal a bit of their freedom on the rooftops, even then. This was before the Great War had come to such a head, mind you, before she needed him to be more than he was. “He was taller than a mountain.”

Leanathy—she smiled at this from deep in the very white, very beautiful bedsheets that Mythal had provided for her. Her hair was so black it seemed to be alive. And probably, it was. The magic of Solas’s mother—it was very strong and very strange. It was like the earth itself. She patted Mythal kindly on the knee. “Other than his hands,” she said, “my husband was the softest man you ever knew. There was never anything to fear, child.”

It was hard to believe they’d been peers once. Leanathy was supposed to be a queen, just like Mythal. But she was not. She was just a kind widow, it seemed. Disproportionately kind, Mythal thought, especially to the demure, brown-haired woman who, in all of her power and glory, had enslaved her only son.

But Mythal had not asked for the way things became. And though she knew she was no innocent, she had not asked for a world in which the enslaved were a necessity to freedom. Most of them, like Leanathy, Mythal had tattooed in the blood writing so that she could protect them from the blood writing of others. Others who were not so kind in the end. Others who would have destroyed their world forever if Fen’Harel had not gotten there first. At least Fen’Harel, in all of his pain and compassion, as he bound her murderers and built the Veil piece by piece, had managed to grow something from the ashes. Something truly good. And now, he wanted to preserve that creation. His vision. She should be proud of this.

But instead, she spent much of her time being angry with him. Why? Her love pulled her in a thousand directions. She wanted him back, and yet, this made no sense. Back how? Back where? She wanted him to live, to be happy and breathing, like the man he was meant to be. At some point, time made all of this very unclear to Mythal, just like everything else. She stopped worrying over it after a while, but seeing him again, in the Crossroads, it was a reminder. And now she wasn’t sure whether she loved this world because she actually loved it, or simply because it was his. It was a thing that he had made. But were these things so different in the end? Were they really that different at all?

Mythal had a lot of demons. Mythal had a lot of anger. Mythal had a lot of love to give. But Mythal did not have a body, and she did not have a purpose outside her own revenge, and now, even that was failing her. And her wolf, free, had come to love another, and it didn’t matter how many songs she wove into the trees or how many purple flowers she made grow in Crestwood, other than him and the few that remained beyond her reach, like Sorrow—flung to the wind now, poor, sweet mockingbird—all of her children were dead.

 

“Can I ask you something?” said Solas. “Sene.”

He had his knuckles to her freckled jaw. He was staring at her. Mouth. Skin. She was a hard piece of light, and he was melting against her. The need to open up, and the need to be inside of her were a part of one another now. The feeling was strong. He went away.

“Solas?” she said.

“Hmm?”

“Are you with me?”

“What?” He glanced up. She was smiling. So young, he thought. He pushed the loose hair back, off of her neck and sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just got lost for a moment.”

“Where did you go?” she said.

“Nowhere really,” he said. He moved his fingers through her hair. “I just miss you.”

She smiled, held his jaw, kissed the bridge of his nose the way that he liked. “Ask your question,” she said.

“Very well,” he said. “I was wondering if you would let me take you to the Fade.”

She furrowed her red eyebrows, looked down, reached for his hand and held it in both of hers in her lap. She grazed her thumb across the scarred parts. She was uneasy. “The Fade?” she said.

He lifted her chin so that he could make out her expression. “It was scary last time, wasn't it?”

“Yes, it was,” she said.

“I won’t let anything like that happen again,” he said. “I am better prepared now. And you are stronger, too.”

“I am?”

“Yes, you are. You no longer fear that which you do not understand. You do not fear the anchor.”

“I don’t like it,” she said, gazing at her wrist. “I wish it would go away.”

“I know you do,” he said. “But that is not the point.”

“What will we do there?” she said.

He paused for a moment, staring at the fabric of her collar. Just a small square of green velvet. A little crooked. He reached forward to straighten it for her. “Are you agreeing to come?”

“Maybe,” she said.

“What I have to tell you, Sene, it might be easier just to show you. If that makes sense.”

“It does,” she said, tentative. She sighed. “Of course I’ll go, Solas. Of course.”

He was tense. "Good," he said, smiling. Then, with a cool sleight of hand, he put the hair behind her ear and plucked one of the pins and placed it firmly between his teeth.

“Hey,” she said. “Give it back.”

“You don’t need so many pins, vhenan. Your hair is perfect the way that it is.”

“Compliments do not excuse your thievery, Solas.”

He smirked at her, chewing the pin. “Yes, but you like it when I compliment your hair, vhenan. Don’t pretend otherwise.”

This made her blush.

He sighed and looked around. The wind. It was knocking on the windows now. It seemed to whisper something through the glass, but Solas couldn't tell what it was. Not yet. He leaned in to kiss her, once, soft. He gathered his courage from within her. He found it, somehow. “ _Ara vhen'an,_ ” he said. He wove his hands into her hair, smoothed it down her back. “Are you ready?”

She nodded. “I am.”

 

When she opened her eyes, she thought she was in Crestwood. The air was warm, and it smelled good. Like roses and mint. He was there, too, holding her hand. He seemed taller than usual, but it was probably just the sun, she thought, which was high over head and pink, unfurling as ribbons in the pale blue sky.

They were standing outside the gate of a low picket fence in front of a house that Sene did not recognize. It was small but lovely. A pale brick and a blue roof with red shutters and smoke rising out of the chimney. There were bone chimes hanging from the porch. The music they made—familiar. She’d heard it before, but she couldn’t place it. All around them were fields and fields of purple daisies. As far as the eye could see.

“Is this Crestwood?” she said.

“No,” he said.

“Where are we?” she said.

“This is the house where I grew up.”

She focused. Pictured.

“This is your house?"

He nodded, smiling as he looked at it. He squeezed her hand in his.

“It’s really pretty,” she said.

“I know it is.”

“Can we go inside?”

“Not yet, vhenan.”

“Why not?”

He glanced down at her. He looked concerned, brow knitted. “I need you to turn around first,” he said, “and tell me what you see.”

A little confused, she obeyed. She turned around. And there, in the distance, she saw a great city. It was unlike anything she’d ever seen before. Massive, stretching past the horizon and into the sky—one million crystal spires. Pink and shell and bone. Floating and rooted alike. It was surrounded in a haze of glitter and reflections of the sea, and there were no clouds, just light, and more light, and more pink, and if she listened very closely, suddenly, she could hear it. The sounds of the people, of movement, wheels and steam engines, turning, bustling. Everything around her felt very old and very new, all at once. She let go of his hand.

“What is that?” she said, crushed in awe. “What am I seeing?”

“What do you think you're seeing, Sene?”

“Arlathan,” she said without hesitation, blinking, rapid past the sun. “It must be. Arlathan.” She looked up at him.

"That's right,” he said, staring at the city himself now, the hair pin still clicking around in his teeth, even in the Fade. He hadn't been here in so long. “That is Arlathan, and behind us, that is the house where I grew up.” Then, he looked at her, and the way he looked—the question—it was a blessing. “This is it, Sene. This is it. Do you understand?”

She was confused at first. Of course. She looked back at the house, then at the city, then up at him, then to the city once more. But then, something clicked. She met his eyes with hers. Slowly, she moved her hands to the back of his neck, and she just stared. Into him. He could feel it—her strength, her focus as she held him there. And he let her. She pressed her thumb across his brow and down the angle of his jaw, and she placed the back of her hand on each cheek as if to check his temperature. Her face was filled with wonder. Her hair like a nest in the breeze. He could hear the rustling of the daisies in the distance. He waited. Until finally, she spoke.

“You’re an ancient elf,” she said, but she was no longer in awe. Not really. In fact, she was calm now. Even. Sure of herself. “Like Abelas.”

“You are not surprised?” he said.

“No,” she said, her warm hands on his cheeks. “And yes. It makes so much sense.”

“I’m sorry I’ve kept so much from you, Sene,” he said, anxious beneath her touch. “That I kept—this. I am sorry. I just didn't know how.”

“I understand,” she said, softly.

“No,” he said, growing serious. “You do not have to understand."

"But I do. I understand why you kept this from me."

"Everything about my life is very, very complicated, Sene," he said. "I am coming to terms with it piece by piece.” He took a hold of her then, hard behind the ears, and he pressed their foreheads together. “I tried to do it alone, but I know now that I need your help,” he said. “Will you help me?”

She stood firm, braced beneath him, as a pillar. There was a moment, an understanding. And when he felt her nod, the feeling set him free. He touched his lips to her forehead, and he closed his eyes.

And when he did, he saw the Breach. It was a terrible darkness. A death that would not let go. There were not enough seasons in the year, he thought. _What has happened to all the seasons?_ When he built the Veil, had it been winter? He thought he remembered snow. But it had been the mountains, and in the mountains, there was always snow. Somewhere, it was always winter, he thought. Always.

"Solas?"

He felt her. Arms, reaching around his waist, yanking him back into the light. He opened his eyes. She rested her head against his chest so that her hair floated up and tickled his nose. She was staring back at the house his father had built. He was surprised. He held her. “Sene?” he said. “What is it?"

“Can we go inside now?” she said. "Now that I know?"

After all of this, she was still just his ball of red curls and freckles in the sun. She just wanted to see.


	34. The elves are asleep.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Taking inventory. Bonds renewed. 
> 
> But a love like this does not come cheap.

She handled the pieces of his childhood gently. With her freckled hands and wrists. Every tea cup. Every scrap of lace. He mostly watched, his hands in his pockets as he followed her from room to room, and she ran her fingers over the buttery curtains, and she sat down on the velvet couch, and she bounced on the cushions, and she put her face into the throw pillows and breathed. Sene needed to touch everything. He’d known that she would. Every texture, every surface. It was a part of why he loved her. She had to put her hands and her face right in it. Even in the Fade, she required sensation to convince her of her reality.

It had been daytime outside, but here, now, inside, it was night. The windows were dark, and there were crickets on the wind. The hearth was lit. The kitchen smelled good, and for a long time, Solas wondered what day it was.

When they’d first come inside, there had been a pot boiling on the stove. Sene looked around, half-frightened. "Is someone here?" she whispered.

“It is just a memory, vhenan,” he said, smoothing a hand up her back. “Memories are living.”

She walked right up to that pot after that. She peaked under the lid as if it were her very own.

“Some kind of soup,” she said, smiling. “Leeks?”

“My mother made a lot of soup,” said Solas. “She liked to throw a lot of things in the pot at once.”

This charmed Sene deeply. Sene liked soup, too, and she liked vegetables and roots and things that grew from the ground, because that meant they were supposed to be there. They were alive.

Sene was especially fascinated by the small things in Solas’s old house: the glass jars of light that hung from the ceiling, and how they were filled with butterflies and gave the room its pinkish glow. She flipped through the books from the bookshelves, their broken bindings—atlases and almanacs of herbs and creatures, and she held each of his father’s old wooden carvings of birds and men and commented on their subtleties and their perfect craftsmanship, and how she wished it all were real so that she could take one of the figurines home to study. She touched the copper pots and pans in the kitchen, and the wooden surface of the table. She touched Solas's old winter jacket where it hung from a hook by the door. In one of the pockets, she found a hair ribbon of blue satin. She studied it briefly and then handed it to Solas, but she did not ask whose it was. She did not ask any questions at first. She just wandered and looked and touched, marveling at how little magic there actually was, how things were so strangely typical, even for her, and then every so often, she would turn and pass him by and mold her hand into his and tug him in a new direction, and she would kiss his knuckles, and sometimes she would laugh at the things she found, and sometimes, her brow would wrinkle at some detail that only she seemed to see, and he would feel her getting sad inside.

She twisted her hair into a braid to keep it from getting in her face, and then she went into his mother’s bedroom. It had exposed brick walls—painted white. The windows were open, and the curtains were sheer and, in the breeze, moved delicately as veils. She sifted through the things on the low, brass vanity. Vials of perfume, little bits and pieces of dried flowers and blue feathers and rabbits feet on chains. There was a small pot of rouge and a folded yellow handkerchief, a hand mirror and several silk scarves hanging off the back of the chair. There was the hairbrush. This, Sene noticed most. She picked it up and weighed it in her hand. It was heavy, metal. She turned to Solas who leaned in the doorway.

“This is your mother’s?” she said.

He straightened up off the jamb. She gave it to him. He held it with both hands, studying its filigree and tarnished handle.

“It’s fancy,” said Sene. “Made of solid silver. Everything else here is beautiful, too, but it's made of wood or brass.”

“My mother was of high birth,” said Solas, turning the brush over to study the bristles. “This was a stolen relic from her childhood.”

“High birth?” said Sene.

He nodded. “We had stark social hierarchies back then, Sene. She was born to a ruling house. She relinquished her family name to marry my father.”

Sene was surprised. She didn’t know that things like that actually happened. She thought they only happened in books and fairy tales.

“That must have been hard,” she said. “She was brave.”

“I’ve never really thought of it like that before,” said Solas, mesmerized. He began to loosen the black hair gathered in the bristles and methodically tugged it free—one soft mass, vibrating in his fingers. “Her family was extremely rich. You should have seen their castle. Huge spires made of crystal. It was rivaled by few in the city, and their garden was a thing of glory. But they were neglectful people, and cold. I did not really know them until I was older. I sought them out by myself when I was a teenager, several years after my father's death. We were running out of money, and we needed help. But they wanted nothing to do with her, or with me. They had me removed from the premises. When I told her all this, my mother waved it off, said I should forget about them. She said all we needed was our house—this house—and each other. I thought she was being stubborn, but looking back now, I believe she was right. And you are right, Sene. That she was brave. She knew better.”

All of this filled Sene with grief and worry. Solas was a stern man, sometimes to his detriment, and hearing him remember his mother this way—it both shook her and made her glad. She did not know what to do. So she did the only thing she could. She linked her arm in his and put her head on his shoulder. It was fast, but he kissed her on the hair when she did this, and she knew this meant it was working.

He turned and led them down the narrow, stone hallway to his old bedroom after that. The only room they hadn’t seen yet. Inside was the bed and its brass frame, the blue sheets, the wooden desk, the books, the tall, wooden chest of drawers. Solas was minimalist. He'd kept very few mementos, even then. There was an old linen shirt hanging off the chair at the desk, and it was soiled around the collar. Solas sat down on the bed. It made a creak. Muscle memory. Sene stood in the doorway for a moment, unsure. She eventually went in the room and pulled out the chair from the desk, and she sat across from him. She had wanted to sit next to him, but he’d parted from her in the doorway, and she didn’t know. It was all so strange and delicate. As Solas sat, examining the brush and his mother’s black hair, she picked up the shirt hanging off the back of the chair, buried her face in the collar, and inhaled. It smelled exactly like Solas, and like smoke, and elfroot and the outdoors. She folded the shirt and held it in her lap.

“Tell me about her magic,” said Sene. "Was she like you?"

It took him a moment, but eventually, he answered. “She was strong,” he said.

Sene was leaning with her chin on the back of the chair, staring past him now and out the window. At some point, the night sky had begun moving, and it was now purple and gray and pink, and it snaked around out there like a bathtub filled with stars and smoke and crystalline rocks in the shapes of apples, and she wished so bad it could be real.

“How strong?” she said.

“She was unique,” he said. “An artist. Subtle, but her magic was much stronger than my father's. She never had the wherewithal to harness its true nature. She put it to use in small ways. But what I saw—I could feel that it was just the beginning.”

“What kind of magic was it?” said Sene. “Or—I don’t know. How did it work—magic?”

"Sort of like it does now,” said Solas. “There were specialties, areas of study. Everyone had magic, but not everyone’s magic was equal. Some were born more powerful than others. Gifted. Just like with anything else.”

“Your mother was gifted,” said Sene.

“She was, and she liked water.”

“Water?”

“She could do anything with water,” said Solas, turning the brush in his hand. “It was a part of her majesty. She could make it snow indoors. Once she grew a thousand year old tree from a puddle in the garden. She could make flowers out of ice. Real flowers. Not just shapes. Creatures that breathed and grew. Whenever I’d come home from one of my boxing matches, my face pummeled to a piece of meat, she’d make me a brand new flower of ice, always different than the last one. I pretended not to care.”

“But you did,” said Sene. “You cared."

He smiled. “Yes, I did.”

"I don't like to think of you with your face beat up," said Sene.

"Neither do I," said Solas.

She shifted around on the chair a little bit. The shirt in her lap crinkled. She reached into the front pocket and found a few stray rolling papers and nothing else. “She had black hair?” said Sene. "Your mother."

"Yes," he said.

"What about your father?"

“My father was bald," said Solas, "like I am. It was just the way some were born. Like how you’re a redhead, and Sera is blond.”

“I have so many questions,” said Sene, pressing her fingers to the little paper squares, then putting them back in the shirt pocket, “but I know I can't ask them all right now. It doesn’t seem right.”

“I understand, vhenan,” he said, looking up at her. “But you can ask me anything.”

“Okay." She smiled. “Can I come sit by you?”

“Of course.”

She kept the shirt with her, and when she sat, she could feel the bed sink a little beneath their weight. Solas balled the poof of his mother’s hair in his fist, turned it over, twice, like a magic trick, and when he opened his hand again, it was gone. Sene kissed his shoulder. He reached down to set the hairbrush down on the floor next to his feet, and then he turned to her. 

"Show me something," she said.

He smiled, and without question, smoothed the hair off of her face, and from behind her ear, drew a little yellow flower in the shape of a star.

She laughed. He gave it to her. “What’s this for?” she said.

"Nothing,” he said.

“I can’t remember the last time you gave me a flower.” She put it to her nose. It smelled like cream.

“Yes well, you've always been much more partial to butterflies."

"Where do the butterflies come from?" she said, touching the flower to his chin, twirling it in circles.

“Butterflies were my father’s thing,” he said. He took her hand, holding it in both of his. “He taught me how to make them when I was a child. After he died, I never stopped.”

“My mother used to make me flowers out of string and tissue paper,” said Sene. “All different colors and shapes.”

“Do you still have them?” said Solas.

“I’m not sure,” said Sene, opening his palm, setting the flower inside. “Or, yes. But I haven’t been home in so long. I don’t know if they’re still there. They’re just tissue paper. One flood, and they’re nothing.”

“Does the place you grew up flood often?” said Solas. He set the flower on the bed sheets between them. He balled her hand into a loose fist, traced his thumb over the knuckles, one by one.

“No,” said Sene, watching. “The Minanter will only flood once or twice a year. Sometimes the rains get heavy. But it’s been almost a year since I’ve been back there, Solas. Anything could have happened.”

They met eyes.

“Are you worried?” he said.

“A little,” she said. "I'd like to go back, I just don't know when."

"Soon," said Solas.

She smiled. She was so earnest. He let his knuckles graze the freckles at her jawline and tried to smile.

“Solas,” she said.

“Yes, vhenan.”

“Can you explain—how you are here?”

“How I am here?”

She looked away, red-cheeked. “I’m sorry. I just—was it like Abelas? Were you asleep?”

He nodded. “Yes,” he said, catching her eyes. Little stars. “But for much longer at a stretch. Abelas awoke periodically per his duty to Mythal. I never left the Fade.”

“What about your body?”

“My body slept at Skyhold,” he said.

She was quiet after this, her brow furrowed.

"Sene?" he said.

“Skyhold?”

“Yes, Skyhold.”

She looked down at his hand where it held hers. Papery, leather, hard. "I can't believe it," she said.

“I’m sorry, Sene,” he said, holding it tighter now, kissing her palm. “I’m sorry.”

“I know, it's just—” She looked at him. “It's where we live. You and me.”

He studied her eyes, shifting.

“I wish you wouldn’t have kept that from me,” she said. “Whose castle was it? Before?"

“It was mine,” said Solas. “I built it as a sanctuary. It was my home. For a little while.”

“You built it?” she said. “You built Skyhold?”

“Not with my own two hands,” said Solas. “Not entirely. But yes. I built it. And now, it is yours.”

“But why would you give it to me?” she said.

“Because your people needed a home,” he said. “And because you deserved it. And because I was in love with you. I wanted you to have it, Sene.”

Somewhere outside, a little bird began to sing. A nightingale. It was pretty, and yet, frenetic, going on and on and on.

“You were in love with me?” said Sene.

“Yes, of course I was," said Solas.

“All the way back in Haven, you were in love with me?”

“Are you surprised?”

“Yes, I am.”

"How come?"

“What do you mean?” she said. “I had to spend two whole months hunting you down on rooftops before you would even let me hold your hand. And even then, I had to steal it.”

“You did not have to steal it.”

“Yes, I did.”

“I didn’t know that I loved you, Sene. Not yet.”

“How do you not know something like that?”

“By being me,” he said. “Perhaps you’re forgetting our conversation on the bridge in Crestwood. If you have, let me remind you. I’m not particularly skilled at recognizing my own feelings or intentions, let alone communicating them. Especially in times like this.”

“You communicate your feelings to me all the time, Solas,” said Sene. “You’re very good at it. A little _too_ good sometimes.”

“Well, yes. Now I am,” he said. “Now that I have you.”

Something fluttered past the window. They both turned to look. A bird, maybe the nightingale. Or a fish with wings. It could have been either for all Sene knew.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“What do I mean?” said Solas. “You know what I mean, vhenan.”

“No, I don’t. When did it become clear that you _had_ me?”

He blinked, surprised.

"Hello?" she said. "When?"

He shook his head. "When we—you know. For the first time."

“Seriously?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Is that so unusual?”

“I don’t know,” she said, withdrawing her hands then, dramatically, and setting them in her lap. “How the fuck would I know what’s unusual? I was a virgin before you, Solas. In every last sense of the word, I assure you.”

“I know that,” he said. “That is not what I meant. Sene—”

“How old are you, Solas?" she said. "Really?"

“Excuse me?”

“How old are you?” she said. “I want to know the truth.”

“You know the truth, Isene,” he said. “I did not lie to you about my age in the Temple of Mythal.”

“You told me you were thirty,” she said. “But that’s Arlathan out there. Clearly, you are not thirty.”

“Age is not proof of existence in years form. I was thirty the last time I walked in my body. That is my age. The age that I feel. My _essential_ age.”

“Does your body age?” said Sene. “Is it aging right now, right before me eyes, as we speak?”

“Well, no it isn't,” he said, looking down at his hands, then back up at her, "technically I am not in my body right now. And neither are you.”

She shoved him. “Don’t be an asshole.”

“I’m not,” he said. “I’m just being thorough.”

“Well, you would.”

“Sene, I don’t know,” he said. “The answer to your question is that I don’t know.”

“You don’t know if you’re aging?”

“No, I don’t. Everything is different now. I’m still figuring it out. Do I _look_ older to you?”

“After a _year_?" said Sene. "No, you don’t. Do _I_ look older to you after a year?”

“Of course not.”

“That’s a relief.”

“Sene, please. I’m sorry. I am trying. I want to answer all of your questions. I want to be truthful with you, but there is so much truth, and it’s very sticky, and it’s all connected. I cannot do it all at once. The process would leave us both very, very confused.”

“I just want you to tell the me things," she said.

“I am,” he said.          

“Do you promise?” she said.

“Do I promise what, vhenan?”

“That you’ll tell me things. This kind of stuff. Like, how you feel. Exactly how you feel. From now on.”

She watched the muscles flutter in his jaw, once. A reflex.

“Solas, it's just me,” she said, putting her hands on his shoulders. "I'm not asking you for anything you don't already want to give."

"I know,” he said. “Isene, I know. And yes, I promise.”

"Okay,” she said. "Then will you please tell me something, Solas? Right now?”

“I will tell you anything,” he said.

“How do you feel?” she said. “In this very moment. How do you feel?”

At first, he was quiet. She could tell that, though he'd known it was coming, the question still intrigued him. It was like opening a new door. A new opportunity. They sat cross-legged, both of them, facing one another on the bed. “How do I feel?” he said.

“Yes. How do you feel?”

“I feel like kissing you,” he said without hesitation.

“You do?”

“Yes. But I do not know if I should.”

“Why not?” said Sene.

"Because I know what it would become,” said Solas, “and perhaps you've forgotten, but we made an agreement on that ledge in Crestwood.”

“I have not forgotten.”

“I left after that, and then—”

Finally, the tension broke. He swallowed, hard. She could see the lump in his throat as he looked away.

“What, Solas?"

He put his hands into hers then. Big, heavy things. Like leather mits. “I need to know that you’re all right,” he said, looking at her. “Before I—before we do anything of that nature.”

“What do you mean?”

“The miscarriage, Sene,” he said, softly. “I told you, and then we argued, and then we made up, and then we slept, and then we came here. We never talked it through. Not really.”

Sene looked down. She still had Solas's old shirt in her lap.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“Sene.”

She looked at him, hard. “Solas, I swear. It’s okay.”

But it was like bees buzzing in her hair. He knew she was lying, and he could feel her shutting him out, swatting his focus away with her own. But his weighed more than hers. It was older and meaner and had a grit to it. He rarely used it to get to her, but in times like these, he had to.

"Solas,” she said.

“I know you,” he said.

“What?”

“I have my demons, Sene,” he went on. “They are old and big. They can make me into a bad person who says and does regrettable things. You and everyone else in the Inquisition have known this about me for some time. But you, Sene—your demons. They are not so obvious. They are not as old, and they are not as big as mine, but they are real.”

"Solas, please stop.”

“Don’t run from this,” he said, shaking his head, holding her eyes. He could feel himself softening. He did not want to lose her. “Please, Sene. Listen to me.”

The lights in the room flickered twice. She glanced around, startled, but then looked up at him. It took her a long time to really react. She just stared at the space between them as if in a trance, as if waiting for the lights to flicker again, or to go out completely. But then, out of nowhere, she leaned forward, and she took a hold of him by the collar. She pulled into his lap hard, and she lowered, and she huddled into him with her face in his neck, becoming small. The act was surprising, and yet it wasn’t. At first, he resigned himself to her, his hands falling limp at his sides. He wasn’t entirely sure what it meant. Her aggression, how she’d taken him so hard, so fast. He thought about it, calculating Sene and her many choices.

She’d used to need him more. This, he remembered. When they first got to Skyhold, and they were just friends. Or, it was more than friends. But it wasn’t lovers. He’d thought of them as friends. She was fearful all the time, and he was like her teacher. A source of knowledge, and in that, comfort. But Sene had always liked touch, and she would put her head on his shoulder constantly. It was not flirtation. Or, at least it wasn’t always. It was something else. She just needed him—his body, his presence—something tactile to tear her back into the moment, to keep her there. Sene did not like to dwell in the past, and to her, the concept of the future held little meaning. It was when these ideas got all tangled up in her brain, messing with the present, that she crumbled. So he provided for her a better order of the mind, and she grew stronger for it. Braver, content.

But then, one night, they became sexual creatures, and after that, it became all about him—the comfort, the care. But that was not the answer, nor was it the end. There were two them. He put his heavy arms around her, held her, and in that moment, she wilted.

They stayed like that for a long time.

"What are you afraid of Sene?" he finally said into her hair.

“That you’re going to die,” she said.

"What else?"

"Something worse.”

“What is worse than death, vhenan?”

She released him at the collar. “That you’ll leave me,” she said.

He found a way to look at her then. "When did it start?"

"Last night," she said. "I kept feeling this...absence. Like you were dead."

"That's why you kept waking up."

She nodded. "I know it's stupid."

"It is not stupid."

"I'm trying really hard, Solas," she said, almost like a confession. "I swear. I don't know why these things keep happening to me. Sometimes, I just wish it would all stop."

"I know," he said.

"I wish I knew what was coming."

He closed himself around her, and he let the magic of the Fade come in and fuse them. It was wholly perceptive, and yet, it was not. Her energy and his. Blue blossoms covering the moon. The world outside could be big and scary for Sene. Like burnt pages in a book going on forever. Only the thing about a book is that it can be closed. You did not have to leave it open on the bedside table to haunt you in your dreams.

"Just continue on your path, vhenan," he said to her. "Do not focus on what lies ahead, as it will find you, no matter what you do. One step at a time. I am right here."

She had her cheek pressed to his shoulder. She was still tense. "Can we stay here forever?" she said.

He sighed. "I wish we could, vhenan."

She unfolded then, peaked out from beneath her big red nest. The braid at the back of her neck was coming free. As usual, her hair had taken on a mind of its own.

"I should fix this," he said, handling the braid, the piece of twine holding it together, studying where it ended and where it began.

But she removed his hand, and instead, she undid the braid herself and discarded the twine to the bed sheets between them, right next to the yellow flower. “Please kiss me, Solas,” she said. “Unless you truly don’t think it would be right. Just do it.”

He took a deep breath. He still wasn't sure. He moved both of his hands into her hair to shed the last of the braid. She was like a red dandelion, parts of her blowing away, but parts that were unshakable. He tried to number the freckles on her nose, but he lost count. Her hands were on his cheeks now, dry and hard and very warm.

“Solas?” she said.

“Yes, vhenan,” he said.

“Where did you go?”

“Freckles.”

“Freckles?”

He kissed her.

She kissed him.

They kissed, and he traced every line of her skin with the scarred arches of his knuckles as if the two had been connected for eternity. Huge truths in little bodies. Finding each other from the long dead of winter, but there was light on the sea now, and pink creeping in off the edges of the sky. It was spring. Or at least that’s what it felt. She told him how she'd missed him as he put his mouth to her neck, and she said it was more than just mind and heart. _It was body_ , she whispered. She missed the weight of him in her hand, and she missed the taste and the noises he made. She said she missed the soft press of his tongue, the ridge and the shape of him. She missed his face and the way it made her feel when he came. She kept going. Hearing her talk with such confidence, it brought Solas to life so hard, so fast, he wasn't sure where to begin. He grew frantic. But somewhere, he thought as he found his breathing in the sheets, and then he made her naked and felt his way inside, it was always spring, and spring was full of beginnings.

Morning came before they knew what to do with themselves. Time here was fabricated. Not even Solas could have told you how it worked or how much had actually passed. But there were finches in the garden, and little poofs off the cotton plants whooshing past the window. Sene got up to find them something to eat, because she said that even though it was the Fade, food was important after sex, a reminder that bodies are needful things of constant maintenance, and we’d do well not to forget. She didn't use these words, but he knew what she meant. She went naked into the kitchen and came back with the whole cookie jar.

“Are you aware that the shirt I found hanging off your chair reeks of elfroot?” she said.

He was braiding her hair now. “That’s probably because, as a teenager, I smoked constantly.”

“You did?”

“Not up in trees like you. More like on rooftops.”

“Was there a girl?” she said.

He sighed, set the braid over her shoulder.

“I'm just asking," she said.

“Yes, there was," he said.

“The girl whose hair ribbon I found in the kitchen?”

He kissed her between the shoulders, once, then turned her around so he could see her face. “Yes, that girl,” he said. “She was my friend. But perhaps we could save that story for another time.”

“Okay,” said Sene.

He smiled. But then, something changed. He sensed a stirring in the air. A presence, but it was not demonic, and it was not a part of the Fade. It was something else. “Do you feel that?” he said to Sene.

“Feel what?” she said.

“Like it’s snowing?”

“Snowing?”

She looked up as if she half-expected the ceiling to burst open and the sky to wilt.

“Take my hand,” he said calmly, as if he had it all figured out.

“What for?”

“Please, vhenan."

She took his hand, and then, as if nothing had happened, and no time had passed at all, and the world was not ending and the two of them were free to live out their lives in little enchanted places of sun and greenery and pets and worlds they invented all by themselves, they were awake. The two of them. In Skyhold.

“It's about time,” came a voice. There was a man, standing in the bright, white sun coming through the windows. “I've been waiting for entire minutes here."

"Dorian?" said Solas. A shock, all of it.

“Fuck,” said Sene, pressing her hands to her cheeks.

“Alert the bards!” called Dorian, finally coming into focus, slamming shut the book he’d been holding over by the desk. “The elves are awake. My, my. Solas, old buddy. It’s good to see you.”

Solas tried to smile, but he ended up glaring instead. “Indeed," he said. "Might I ask who let you in here?”

“The guard at the door, of course,” said Dorian, adjusting the rings on his fingers. “He knows I’m close, personal friends with the Inquisitor. Sene, you look ravishing since I saw you last. What has it been, eighteen hours?”

"It's good to see you, too," said Sene, disentangling herself from the couch. Arms and legs everywhere.

"Oh dear," said Dorian, watching them, clicking his tongue. "That is a most unpleasant sight."

"What is _most unpleasant?_ " said Solas.

"Watching the two tallest elves in Thedas attempt to take a Fade nap on such a tiny piece of furniture. Use the bed next time, won’t you?”

“We are not the two tallest elves in Thedas,” said Solas, digging his fists into his eyes. “Sera has Sene by at least one whole inch.”

“At least,” said Sene, taking his hands away from his face. She wanted to see him. “Why’d you bring us back?” she whispered.

“It was time,” he said.

“My dear Solas,” said Dorian.

Solas sighed, put his feet on the floor, straightened up. He was putting on his mask of diplomacy. Though, with Dorian, it was really more sarcasm than anything else. “What can I do for you, Dorian?”

“First of all,” said Dorian, leaning against the bookshelf, debonair with his hands clasped behind his back. “I expect you’re happy to see me. It’s been weeks. How have you been keeping yourself busy?”

“I’ve been playing a lot of cards,” said Solas. “There’s been a lot of whiskey.”

“Cards and whiskey?” said Dorian. "I'd like to see that."

“You’ll get your chance.”

“Anyway,” said Dorian, examining his nails, “I was hoping that, now that I’m back, and we're all just biding our time as Sene's trusty advisors attempt to locate the mad magister, you might be willing to _actually_ teach me that spell you performed at the Temple.”

“Bull pestering you about sex on the war table again?” said Solas.

“What?” said Sene.

Dorian leaned forward against the desk, rolled his eyes. “For the love of Andraste. Sene, take everything this man says with a massive grain of salt, won't you?"

"I typically do," she said.

Solas smirked. "Well then," he said to Dorian. "In any case, of course I'll teach you the spell. I made you a promise, and I always keep my promises."

"Well, that is good to hear," said Dorian. "Now, I know you’re busy at the moment, but perhaps this afternoon?”

“Meet me in the rotunda, after lunch."

“Splendid,” said Dorian, on his way past them, to the door.

"Come prepared," said Solas.

Dorian paused, looked back. "You mean like, with chains?"

"Excuse me?"

"Just a joke."

"I meant that there will be no kid's gloves," said Solas, standing from the couch to face him with his hands in his pockets. "No pretenses. It is a difficult spell, and we will work quickly, and we will waste no time."

"Trust me when I say that I can handle it," said Dorian.

"From you, I'd expect nothing less," said Solas.

Sene was watching politely from the couch, her chin resting on her hands.

"Thank you, Solas," said Dorian, walking to the door. "I appreciate that, coming from you." But he stopped before taking the handle, and he looked back, right at Sene. 

She was getting up from the couch to see him out. She tugged at her clothes. She was uncomfortable. They were a little fancy for her. The green collared shirt, and all that silk. Work clothes. She should have been in armor, thought Dorian, or at the very least, a cotton dress, like the one she'd worn in Crestwood. She stood next to Solas, very tall and very red-haired, and she smiled with her hands behind her back, sweetly. The two of them, together, sort of disheveled. Like children, Dorian thought, caught in the act. He smiled.

"What's with you?" said Solas.

"Oh, nothing," said Dorian. "Just glad to see that the two of you are back to your frolics, is all."

"I have never once frolicked," said Solas, "and neither has Sene."

Dorian opened the door. "Actually," he said over his shoulder, "I believe you just did."

Then, he bid them farewell, and he was gone.

Solas sighed, heavy. He watched the door for a while as if he thought Dorian might come back, or as if the door itself might disappear, or turn into a great big mouth and eat them up. But eventually, when the door did nothing, and it was just a door, he turned to face Sene with his hands still in his pockets. He fished around until he found one of her hairpins, and then he put it in his mouth.

"Well, that was interesting," he said. "Shall we begin?"

"Begin what?" she said.

"The day, vhenan."

She blinked, almost as if she hadn't heard him.

"Sene?" said Solas, concerned, putting the hair behind her ear. "Are you with me?"

She smiled, nodded once. "I'm fine," she said. Like an echo. "Why?"

The ice was melting on the windows behind her. The sun was warm, but it was still cold outside. Solas could tell. She'd dressed up that morning. He hadn't really noticed this before, but it was true. He wasn't sure what it meant. He knew that it had to mean something. 

In the Fade, time held no meaning, but here, it was winter again. She was not fine.

_It's snowing, child. Wake up._


	35. Stop Talking

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Professor Walsh: So this is what it is. Talking about communication. Talking about language. Not the same thing. It's about inspiration, not the idea, but the moment before the idea, when it's total. When it blossoms in your mind and connects to everything. It's about the thoughts and experiences that we don't have a word for. 
> 
> - _Buffy the Vampire Slayer _, "Hush"__

Sene’s mother, a hopeless redhead just like her, was not a Lavellan. Her father was. The Lavellans were vintners and grain farmers and wealthy and famous for their distillery. They were not nomadic. They were liquor distributors, running booze from Wycome all the way to Kirkwall. They were unique, extraordinary per the standards of the Dalish. Her mother was born into another clan, a poorer clan, deeply nomadic and from Ferelden, way north, Highever. In her youth, she had been a huntress, just like Sene. But most of her family was dead by now—from the Blight—or scattered to the wind. Sene’s mother had met Sene’s father in the summer of 9:20, after crossing the Waking Sea on a pilgrimage in the name of Andruil. He named a vintage after her, and the two were married when they were only seventeen. Her name was Rasha. His name was Revasan. Sene was born in 9:22, the 5th of Cloudreach. It had been a cold spring, freak snowfalls freezing the soil, and so her name, _Isene_ , was meant to conjur warmth, to bring fire into a harsh, dead season. Of course, it worked, but it was coincidence, right? Seasons change, even if it takes forever.

Sene had always been scribbly. She won her vallaslin when she was only eleven years old, the youngest in the history of her clan, by a lot. This made people itchy, suspicious. Only her mother was truly proud. She painted a picture to commemorate the occasion—Sene holding her bow, standing at the top of a hill, in front of the great, shining sun, her hair growing right into the fast, red rays. It hung in the cellar where her mother spent a lot of her time in those days, tending the wines and liquors, and reading books, and sketching things into the walls. Many of the boys Sene’s age were jealous of her talent. They were mean to Sene, and they made fun of her height and they made fun of her hair, because they really had nothing else to make fun of her for. Her father, who was supposed to be a vintner but had somehow made his way to Clan Archivist, was especially worried about her.

“This means you will have to stand out, Sene,” he said one morning, holding a bucket of water by the fire and chewing on a stick. He was a stalwart man, brown hair, blue eyes, freckles,and tall. “Do you understand?”

“I’m not stupid,” she said, scraping a whetstone down the side of her hunting blade. Everybody always telling her what to do. “Do _you_ understand?”

When Sene was thirteen, that was the first time she got the guts to run away from home. She was bored and she stole two bottles of wine from the cellar and traded them for a vial of elfroot in the city. The boy who’d sold it to her was an Andrastian elf, about her age, and his name was William. They kicked around on the banks of the river that day, and they got high and talked about things like life and death and immortality, only they had no idea what they were talking about, because they were a couple of high thirteen-year-olds, and what good is that? At some point as the drugs wore off, he wanted to see Sene’s bow, but she wouldn’t let him, so he snuck it off her back and tossed it into the leaves. He stole a kiss, in that moment, as she fumed, and she was so surprised and so embarrassed that she pushed him into the river, and, soaking wet, he laughed. She sort of smiled and blushed after this, huge. It was nice to have a friend, and a boy who didn’t hate her for once, or who wasn’t so bossy. She became dreamy, and stupid after. She tripped over her words, but he thought it was sweet. It was fall, and the leaves were changing. They hung out a few more times, but by winter, William had gone, because his family was traveling merchants who sailed back up the river to Wycome. Sene was heartbroken at first but thankful for their little friendship. She would never forget it. And it was at about this time that she started feeling her way into the world, slowly, spending more time in the city, and with the widower blacksmith of Ansburg.

There are stories of Sene and the Dread Wolf that are probably worth telling at this point, like how she had used to use one of his statues in the woods outside their farm to catch her bearings in the dark. The statue faced north, and so she carved out a secret path right to it from the edge of her family’s private camp, and this was typically where she started each and every one of her lonely hunting excursions. She guarded this path ruthlessly. She did her best to hide it with sticks and bramble, but sometimes, other hunters from her clan would find it, and they would follow it out to the statue, infringing on her territory. She got to setting traps. Once when she was eighteen, one of the boys her age was out there next to the statue, standing right on her path, taking a piss in the weeds. She was hidden high up in a wide-brimmed tree, and she put an arrow in the heel of his boot for a warning, missing his ankle by a thread. On purpose, of course. He threatened to beat the shit out of her when she showed herself. But her father was the Archivist, and she was the most decorated huntress of their clan, and whether that meant anything to him or not, they both knew that if he so much as laid a hand on her, she would have had it separated from his body and drowned in a vat of clear liquor. She told him to suck the Dread Wolf’s dick.

Five months later, however, the same exact boy asked her to go with him to the Dance of the Halla. It was a yearly celebration of Ghilan’nain in which the girls wore dresses and the boys wore cotton suits, and she was so drop-dead surprised when he did this, she started laughing. But he was serious, and she became flattered, because of course she did, and she went with him to the dance, and though she stood, awkwardly, with her arms crossed for most of the night, they ended up going for a walk, and he kissed her out by that very same statue of the Dread Wolf, in the light of Satina, and she thought it was nice, because it was nice to be kissed, and it reminded her of William, these rare moments in which a boy looked at her as more than just a threat, or competition, or an idiot who could not figure things out for herself. It turned out, however, that she just didn’t like him like that. Not this boy. She could not help it. He was brutish and uncomplicated in ways that made her bored, and though she was nice about it, she still rejected him, and he got offended and slumped away into the trees, and two days later he told her off when she tried to say hi to him out in the vineyards. This hurt her feelings. She was not trying to be rude, but boys and their pride—they were so full of emotions, but they just couldn’t _feel_ anything. Meanwhile, Sene felt eveything. She processed fast, and she never looked back. Nobody seemed to understand how or why this worked but her.

It was not even a month later that she was sent to the Temple of Sacred Ashes, blown to pieces by an orb and a magister. The trip south had been long, and she was happy to be out of there, but she couldn’t stop thinking about the boys who’d kissed her and then, for their respective reasons, disappeared.

It was really never any big thing, she thought, nineteen years old, tucked away into a charter ship as it crossed the Waking Sea, on her way to Ferelden. It was just, after everything that had encompassed her feral teenage life, Sene was filled with compassion. And patience. And speed. And all she wanted was a place to put it all. She didn’t much feel like being alone.

 

It had been exactly one week since the Fade.

Solas knew that the two of them had found their way into a kind of rut. The talking, it all dropped off a cliff, and though they slept in the same bed every night, and they never fought, their days were far gone and unpredictable, and they hardly saw each other. He was reeling. He knew he’d fucked up again, as there was obviously something going on, and he couldn’t place it, and he hadn’t felt this confused since he was a teenager. He thought he’d maybe pushed her too hard. In the Fade. Too much, too fast, bringing up the miscarriage like that, and now, she was wild again. Spinning out of his grasp like some sort of solar flare. This was the part of her he could not predict. And so he began to worry about her, in earnest, as he could see a sort of crackling coming off of the energies at her spine—explosive almost, but he would not breach the subject. He thought maybe she would try to run again, and he dreaded these moments, her insolence toward him, as the whole thing was starting to reek of the Arbor Wilds, and the way she’d seemed to seek out death, on some level, just to spite him. He was afraid of this.

Solas was used to control, and taking care of other people. He was used to sacrifice, and losing the war. This blurred his vision. What he’d come to realize over the past several months, was that Sene could, in most capacities, take care of herself. And unlike Solas, she was used to winning. She went to it, like a moth to a candle. And what she needed from him—he was no longer sure. She was young and uncut in a lot of ways, but she was the kind of girl who could hunt, kill, and skin an entire bear by herself in the forest, and she could flip empires, and enchant Orlesian nobility, and she’d brought him to his knees on more than one occasion, so who was he to try and control her pain? She must have needed him for something. He thought he’d figured her out a long time ago, but clearly, this was not true.

She’d lost a pregnancy at the age of nineteen. It was a tragedy. It killed him. But he had no idea how this felt or what it meant to her. He only knew that, at some point, a few days back, as they sat, drinking weak coffee on opposite ends of the couch in her quarters, reading and trying desperately to ignore one another, he’d realized something. That how it felt and what it meant to her—these things were not for him. She was Sene, and whatever ways she hurt, she’d figure it out, and he found himself staring at the little corner of her jaw where it turned into her ear, and he missed her. Whatever was the matter, he missed her. And he was worried, yes, and he would always worry, but that was just what he did, and that was his problem. Not hers.

So he decided, as he sat there, staring at her ear and the piece of red hair that curled around behind it, that he no longer wished to talk about it. That he would be there when she needed him, to whatever degree she desired. He wanted to tell her this, right there, but everything was tripping over everything else, and if he told her this, she might think that it was him trying to take control of the situation, like before. Like in the Arbor Wilds, when, regardless of the reasoning behind her choices, he had, out of anger and frustration, yanked her from a fight that, deep down in his backwards chivalrous heart, he’d known she could win. Of course she would have won.

Because when that Shadow staked her and almost took her life, it had been a surprise. It was from behind. He had to remind himself of this, again and again. That it was not something he could have controlled or prevented, even if he’d known he could. She had not put herself in that situation. It was bad luck. It was coincidence. The wrong place at the wrong time and she, being the important person that she was, would live in a state of constant risk for the rest of her life.

He tried to remember what it was about her family—vintners, grain farmers. Rich. They were rich. As far as the Dalish were concerned, they were so well handled that they did not even keep a mage as their Keeper. He was a businessman, a negotiator. Or, that’s how Sene told it, and Leliana’s research confirmed. There were very few elves like him anywhere, let alone Dalish elves. It was extraordinary. The Lavellans of Ansburg were a provincial people, and they were suspicious of outsiders, humans especially, but they sold to them anyway with a great deal of success. Sene’s job was very specific. She hunted, she gathered, she protected. A leading provider for a large, well-to-do group of people at the age of eighteen. And yet, she was punished for not shutting the fuck up, for not doing what she was told, for accomplishing her tasks _in her own way._ They wanted to control her, and yet, they needed her to be the very thing they could not control. No wonder she threatened to run whenever Solas tried to do the same. He was realizing that, the better he got to know her, the more alike they became. In some ways, this was a shock.

Now, he had to figure out how to keep her. Was she a woman or a girl? Sometimes, she seemed so desperately young and so lost and naïve, he was terrified of what he’d gotten himself into. But other times, she showed a kind of freak maturity. How she dealt with him, his rambling brain, his arrogance, all of this, and how she chose to stick around at all. Out of love. The way she carried herself as Inquisitor, though she feared and hated the work, she loved her people, and she was merciful, and she was stalwart. Like in Val Royeaux, with Thom and the Orlesians. She left no man behind. Even if it was compromising or awkward for her, which it always was, she did not give in to authoritative bullshit. She did what she felt. She lived her life from the very center of her heart, and this is what made him want to do things to her that he couldn’t always explain. Some of them he could explain—like he wanted to be near to her and he wanted to talk to her, to hold her as they slept, to fuck her and to let her fuck him, to braid her red hair. But he also wanted to do other things—like marry her, make her pregnant, build a life with her. These were the things that set him upside down. Where did they even come from? They made everything harder, because it was with these desires—not the sex or the conversation—that the fear set in. The fear of losing her. Because he’d lost before. If only he could tell her. Make her see how worried he was of being alone.

She was not afraid of him. Or his body, or his magic, and she never had been. She only ever wanted more. He knew she wasn’t frightened of his past. It was something else. She was threatened, maybe. It wasn’t something he understood, but it made sense. Because despite all of this, Sene’s world was small, and she was crushed by self-consciousness. She lacked confidence, even purpose. And with Solas, she’d never had anything, or anyone, to compare herself to. His life had been a total mystery to her.

But now.

 

That day was the trial of Samson, and once she’d finished with the throne, Sene went out to the battlements and spent her entire afternoon with Cole. It was cold outside, and they had to wear jackets, but the sun had come a few days earlier and melted all the snow. The world was brown and green and mushy.

“Today is an interesting day,” said Cole, the nug named Pepper rolling around on the ground between them. Little grunts of excitement as Cole scratched his belly. “How do you feel, Sene? I know how you hate to judge the villains.”

“I’m fine, Cole,” said Sene.

Cole looked at her, very calm, like a leaf. Though Sene never really saw him as anything other than a person. He hardly wore his hat anymore and had started letting Cassie comb his hair in the mornings. Cole was technically nineteen years old, which, in terms of age, put him closer to Sene than anyone. She liked this about him, especially right now.

He reached his hand forward and touched the skin of her neck. His touch was dry and firm. “There is physical pain,” he said. “Winter. Sharp. Are you all right?”

“My scar’s been hurting,” she said, shifting around a little to try and reach it. “Maybe from the cold? I’ve heard that’s a thing. It’s on and off.”

“Have you told Solas?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“You should tell him,” said Cole. “Solas is very good at dealing with scars.”

“I will,” she said. Pepper the nug scampered away then. Sene thought he probably needed a friend, like him. A nug friend. She sighed. “I would rather not worry him.”

“When two people who love each other feel the same way, it’s like a little burst in the Fade. Their energies, matching. You and Solas, yours is warm. Like pancakes.”

“What?”

“You seem tired today, Sene.”

She leaned back on her hands, looked up at the sky. She thought about home. “I am,” she said. “How have you been sleeping?”

“Terribly,” said Cole.

She looked at him. “What’s the matter?”

“It’s the weather,” he said. “I don’t like the snow. It makes everything cloudy, full of birds. The noises are very loud. For you, the scar is in your body. For me, it is elsewhere.”

“You mean the other Cole?”

He hung his head, put his hands in his lap. “I would much rather talk about you, Sene,” he said. “You are a warm-weather flower, caught in the storm. I am not a person like you. My feelings are not permanent.”

“Do you know that?” she said.

This—she seemed to stump him. He smiled. “No, I don’t," he said. “I think this is why Solas loves you. A red branch that pokes you in the eye.”

She sighed.

“Have you asked him yet?” he said. “About the blue hair ribbon?”

She sighed again.

“You should ask him. He will tell you the truth.”

“Do you know the truth?” said Sene. “About the hair ribbon?”

“I do not,” said Cole. He flattened his hands on the cold ground, spread his fingers wide. “Solas is very deep. Like the sky underwater. I cannot always tell the surface from the floor.”

“Me neither,” said Sene.

“You and Solas are warriors,” he said, looking up at her. “I know that it’s hard, but perhaps instead of fighting each other, you should go away from this place and fight something else.”

“We’re not fighting,” she said. “Why does everyone think we’re fighting?”

“Because maybe you would like to be fighting,” said Cole. “It makes things easier when you fight. Like anvils. You like anvils, Sene.”

“I do not like anvils.”

“Let your actions speak.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes.”

She was getting itchy. Her sweater was a pale blue wool, given to her by Morrigan who, for whatever reason, had been knitting a lot lately. Every day. Sitting out in the gazebo with her tools and her focus and her very steady hands. Sometimes, Kieran would be there, too, holding the ball of yarn and humming.

Sene cleared her throat. “What do you think we should fight?”

“I am not sure,” said Cole. “I bet the Commander would know."

“Cullen?”

“He is hurting today, too. From Samson. But he likes you, Sene. You should go and ask him about it.”

“He likes me?”

Cole hung his head. “I only mean that he thinks of you. You are beautiful, like a willow plant, or a kite from his childhood. You should not blame him. The Commander is very easy to read.”

“I’ll talk to him,” she said.

“Very good!”

“How’s Cassie?” she said. “Other than pregnant.”

“She is due any day,” said Cole, brushing the hair out of his face. “She would like me to be with her when the baby comes. I promised that I would.”

“You two are close friends,” said Sene.

“She needs someone to tell her that the world is not made of spikes. She is not as brave as you, Sene. Her world is the size of a thimble.”

“I am not that brave,” she said.

“Yes you are,” said Cole. “You are the bravest person I have ever known, and Cassie thinks so, too.”

Sene was shocked to hear this. Her brain felt like putty. She was lonely and squishy, and she needed a shape. She heaped into him, a very big hug. His arms were strong as he held her, and he was a warm animal when the days got rough. “Thanks, Cole,” she said.

“You are welcome,” he said. Then he buried his face into her hair. “Sene,” he said. “Solas is right. Your hair is very tickly. Like a creature! You should always wear it down.”

She shrugged. “Maybe.”

 

Down in the rotunda, Solas was painting. He’d been at it, mercilessly, all day. His forearms bare and paint-smudged, sleeves rolled up tight. He was nearly finished. He could feel the end, tearing into him, like a kill instinct. He knew that he would always be missing something.

At some point, Sera had come and sat on the desk to watch. She’d brought him a cup of coffee, which he still had not touched, and she told him about an adventure that she was planning for herself and Dagna once all this Coryphy-tit shit was past.

“Dagna wants to see where I’m from,” she said, cross-legged, studying the tip of a letter opener she’d found in one of his drawers. “But I said shite no. So we’re going to Antiva City. You know it, right? Wine and…wine. Or something. Guess it’s a pretty big show there. Beauty and all. I just think it would be nice to get away for a while. Don’t you?”

“I have never been,” said Solas, staring up at the fresco with his hands on his hips. He’d been chewing the same hairpin for three straight hours. It was hardly more than a bit of wire in his mouth.

“Seems like you’ve been everywhere, yeah?” said Sera. It was possible she’d said more. He wasn’t listening.

“Not coastal Antiva,” he said anyway, “and before this past year, I’d never been to a great deal of southern Ferelden either.”

“Can’t imagine why,” said Sera, scoffing. “Fallow Mire? Who in their right tits would go there? Oh, right. _Us._ ”

“It does not rain all the time in the Fallow Mire, Sera,” he said, filling in a ragged edge with black paint on the wall. “I believe we were there at a particularly bad time.”

The pin crumbled in his teeth then, finally. He spat the bits to the concrete and continued his work.

“Hey Solas?” said Sera after a while.

“Mmhm?”

“Have you ever painted Quiz?” she said. “Like, really painted her. On a canvas or something. Like, all big and…big. Like this.”

“Yes,” said Solas.

“Right on,” she said. “Can I see it?”

“You’ll have to ask her."

“Why’s that?” said Sera, giggling. “Is it pretty Sene with her bits out?”

"In a manner of speaking,” he said. He smudged the heel of his hand to the paint, turned it for texture. He was trying to think of anything but Sene.

“Of course it’s lovely though, right?” said Sera. “It’s Sene.”

“It is quite lovely,” said Solas, lost.

The room, so empty. Like standing in a great tube.

“I sketch Dagna sometimes,” said Sera, breaking the silence. She set the letter opener down on the desk. “But nothing like this. Just lines on parchment, you know?”

“I’m sure your sketches are lovely, too,” said Solas, taking a deep breath, another step back. “You’re better than you think, Sera.”

 She blushed. “Get off it.”

“As you wish.”

She hopped off the desk. There was a moment.

“What is it, Sera?” he said.

“She’s with Cole,” she said. “Up on the battlements. In case you didn’t know.”

“I did not,” said Solas. “But thank you.”

“She’s been hanging out with…Cole a lot lately. Likes his sparkly brain.”  

“Cole loves Sene,” said Solas. “Sometimes I think he understands her better than anyone.”

“Better than you?” said Sera.

Solas sighed.

“You’re all winchy,” she said. “You and Sene. Aren’t you? I can see it.”

“ _Winchy_?” said Solas.

"You know what I mean, elven man,” she said. “ _Off._ Off-balance. She’s not talking about it. You both leave things so short.”

Solas focused on the color and the sound the paintbrush made against the wall. Cold and dark and wet.

“Solas?” said Sera after a while.

The pitch of her voice—it got to him. He sighed and hung his head. He wiped the sweat from his brow on the back of his arm, dropped the palette and the paintbrush to the floor. A new resolve. He turned to face her. “Everything is fine, Sera,” he said. “I assure you. Please, do not worry.”

“I’m not.”

“Yes, you are.”

“I’m just asking,” she said.

“I’m done here,” he said, swiping a rag from his back pocket. He used it to wipe his forehead, then his hands. “You said Sene is on the battlements?”

“As far as I know.”

He tossed the rag to the desk. “Don’t touch my art, Sera.” He smirked.

“I wouldn’t, you git.”

He saluted her on his way out the door.

Once he was gone, she set the rag aside and noticed his sketchbook. Big leather thing, seeming fancy and important like him. She glanced around to make sure no one was looking, and then she opened it, not sure of what she’d find. She felt guilty at first, but it was filled with these beautiful sketches of Sene and butterflies, flowers, a house and woman she did not know, but a great many familiar faces, too. Dorian and Bull and Cassandra. Some of them were her, and these were dated all the way back to the Emprise du Lion. She smiled. She hadn’t known.

 

Sene was sitting with Cullen now, in the garden. She’d found him in his office, whipping knives at a target etched into the wall. He seemed frustrated, and very tired. His eyes were heavy as little lead flowers and so she suggested fresh air. He was thankful. He was renewed.

Skyhold was full of onlookers. A staple in their lives. Many who came, if they were not soldiers or visiting nobility, were seeking refuge and were easily tipped over into awe at the sight of Sene. She and the Commander sitting together, casually in the garden, sipping tea from porcelain cups, was certainly something to see. Cullen found it confounding, though Sene had grown used to it by now.

“When did all these children arrive?” said Cullen, looking around. He was dressed simply, no furs and armors that day. Sene had encouraged this. Full of decorum, Cullen sometimes needed a reminder. He just wore brown linen slacks and a wool jacket. Morrigan had knitted him a scarf that week, but he could not bring himself to wear it, said it seemed a little too _Orlesian_ for him _,_ but he appreciated the gesture no less.

“More come every week,” said Sene, looking around. Elven children especially. They would come with their Dalish parents, refugees looking to escape unrest in the Exalted Plains, or the Emerald Graves. Since Sene’s handling of the Empress and her allies, negotiations with Dalish Keepers especially in southern Thedas had been going well, and there were also a great many elves joining the Inquisition those days. “I would think you’d like children, Commander, given your family’s closeness.”

“I do,” said Cullen, scratching an itch at the back of his neck. “Typically. It’s just—does Skyhold seem more crowded to you than usual?”

She shrugged. “Perhaps.”

“Ah, well.”

“Cullen,” she said.

“Yes, Sene.”

“About this morning.” She became very serious. She put her hands on the tea cup. It was warm, but she knew the tea was getting cold. She just wasn’t thirsty. “With Samson.”

“Sene—”

“I didn’t know what to do. I let him stay, under your watch,” she went on. “But you may do with him what you will. I am not qualified to determine his fate, Cullen. I am not qualified to determine anyone’s fate, save my own. I’m just me.”

Sighing, shifting. A big man. He leaned forward with his elbows on the table. “I understand, Sene,” he said. “But you did the right thing. What Samson said about the Chantry—it being just as corrupt as Corypheus. I can’t say I don’t agree, in some capacity.” He shook his head.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I apologize, Inquisitor.”

“Please, Cullen. Don't call me that."

“I know you’ve been dealing with your own crop of anger and bitterness, Sene. You don’t need me unloading my own.”

“Maybe I do,” she said, flicking his wrist so that he looked at her. “You’re not a burden, Cullen.”

He smiled, looked at her. But the longer he looked, the more his forehead began to wrinkle. He seemed confused all of a sudden. Sene was confused, too.

“What?” she said, putting her hands on her head, sweeping the hair back off her face. She had it pinned back loosely, but most of it was falling by now.

“Nothing,” said Cullen. “It’s just—your face.”

“Oh.”

“I can’t seem to get used to it. It’s so—”

“Bare?” she said.

“That is one word for it,” said Cullen. “Yes.” He looked down at his tea. He didn’t seem very thirsty either.

“I keep forgetting about it,” said Sene. “Is that bad?”

“Certainly not,” said Cullen. “But speaking of Crestwood, I keep meaning to tell you.”

“What?”

“The bandit faction who tried to kill Solas. As of this week, we’ve officially admonished them. Any who remain seem to have fled the area.”

The mood changed after this. Sene became serious, thought of Cassie. She did not like to think of her, pregnant and alone as her husband was murdered before her very eyes. It made her feel sick to her stomach. “Thank you, Cullen,” she said. “For taking care of it, and for letting me know.”

“My pleasure.”

Then. “Give me something to do,” she said to him.

“What?”

“I’m bored, Cullen,” she went on. “I’m sick of parades in villages and fancy parties in Val Royeaux. Negotiations with Dalish Keepers and Orlesian nobility in Josie’s office. I’m sick of being diplomatic. I am a hunter. That is what I do. Give me something to hunt.”

Cullen looked around. Just then, a child whisked past, bumped their table. He was an elf and seemed to be fast into a game of tag. When he looked up at Sene, his brown eyes got big, and then he ran away. This sort of broke her. She laughed.

“I suppose I have something for you,” said Cullen.

“What?” said Sene.

“Dragons,” he said.

“Dragons?"

He nodded, finally sipping his tea. “There are complaints coming from both sides of the Frostbacks. The Hinterlands. The Emerald Graves. An epidemic in the Emprise du Lion.”

“What does that mean?"

“A total of three High Dragons have moved in,” he said, “just within the past few weeks. They’re threatening several new settlements in the area. Our presence and the liberation of Suledin Keep have eased a lot of the distress there, but dragons make it difficult to move supplies in and out of the mountains. Merchants are refusing to move in until the situation is handled.”

Sene just stared at him. “Why didn’t I know about this?”

Cullen shook his head. “You were busy,” he said. “Val Royeaux, and then Crestwood. This past week has been stressful enough with the judgments of both Thom Rainier and Samson. Plus, the ongoing search for Corypheus. I did not want to overwhelm you, Sene. Negotiations with Duke Gaspard have resulted in a small army of Chevaliers being deployed into the area. They are keeping the dragons at bay, but none have had the balls to enter their lairs.” He scoffed at this, leaning back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest. “Fucking Orlesians and their supposed _balls._ ”

“I appreciate this, Cullen,” said Sene. “But as of this moment, I am no longer too busy.”

“Give me the word,” he said. “Inquisitor.”

“We leave tomorrow.”

“Very well.” He looked at her. Everything with Sene was always kicked hard into focus, especially for Cullen. “You’ll be careful,” he said.

“Of course.”

“And bring Solas.”

She gave him a look. “I always bring Solas,” she said. “Why would you even suggest that?”

“Because I know there’s been…conflict. Between you.”

“What?”

He held up his hand. “I am not prying,” he said. “It is none of my business. But whatever is going on between you two, I know that, no matter what, he will keep you safe.” He folded his hands in his lap and lowered his voice from here. “We need you, Sene. This is a critical time. I know that you forget, and your job is hard, and I am not underestimating you or your talent, but three dragons is a lot of dragons, and as your professional advisor, and your friend, I must ask that you bring Solas, pace yourself, and be cautious.”

Cullen, how he sat there. So proper, she thought. It made her think of Solas, all at once.

“I will be cautious,” she said, lifting her tea cup from the saucer. "Thank you, Commander."

 

She went to find him after that. Solas. She didn't know why, but it was all messed up. He wasn’t in the rotunda, so she sat down at his desk to wait, and then when he was taking forever, she got up, and she walked around, and she looked at his paintings. Such huge, complicated art. Everything about him was so complicated. She had no idea if she was doing it right.

She started to tidy things up a little. Solas could be surprisingly messy when his head was backwards, and especially when he’d been painting. She put the clean brushes all together in their little leather case, and the dirty ones, she left to soak. There were some rags and things that she put into a pile for the servants, and on his desk, she straightened all the letters and the sketches, the notes on magic and things she didn’t really understand. Some of them were not his handwriting, but Dorian’s instead. They'd been spending a lot of time together, trading spells, little spats in ink and parchment, huge mathematical formulas that made absolutely no sense to Sene, followed by things like: _Are you fucking serious, Tevinter?_ and _Too difficult for you, apostate?_ It made her smile.

One of his shirts was hanging off the back of the chair, a familiar pattern, she was realizing. She picked it up, and she sat down at the desk, and she put her face inside it, and breathed. It needed to be washed, but it smelled like him, in ways that made her ache. And so she held it in her lap and closed her eyes.

Then, he was there. He came in from outside, where it was already starting to get dark. He looked cold. He wasn’t dressed for it, like he’d gone out in a hurry, his hands shoved into his pockets. A little hunched. His shoulders big. He was covered in black paint.

“Sene,” he said, standing in the doorway, surprised.

"Hey,” she said.

“I just saw Cullen,” he said. “He said you had tea in the garden.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Very good,” he said.

Then, he looked around, suddenly confused. “Did you clean up?” he said.

She nodded. “Yes.”

He looked right at her. “Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome.”

She could see him digging around in his pockets now, for something, anything to chew. It was compulsion with him, especially in those days. All of his nervous energy. So she got up. She went to him, cautious at first. She took one of the pins out of her hair. “Here.”

He took it, smiled, tracing its little curves and points with his fingers. Then he set it between his teeth, and he looked at her. He had black paint on his hands and on his neck and on his shirt. He sort of tilted his head a little.

“I learned something new yesterday,” he said to her. It was time to take a chance.

She straightened up. She seemed glad. “You did?”

He nodded, pleased with himself. “Would you like me to show you?”

“Yes,” she said.

He smiled. He shook out his hand, and then held out his palm, flat in the space between them. He looked at it for a moment, studying something she could not see. Then, he slowly traced a square on the surface of his skin, and from it, he sort of lifted a piece of brilliant orange tissue paper. It seemed to appear out of nowhere, as if he’d peeled it from the surface of the Veil. He held it between his fingers delicately, testing its weight, and then he folded it into the shape of a flower. He reached forward to put the hair behind her ear, drew a bit of twine. An old trick. And he tied the flower together at the root, and then he tied the whole thing around her wrist, like a corsage. The flower was just like the ones her mother had used to make her, a long time ago. Sene looked at it without saying anything, and then she looked at him.

“The paper bit,” he said, still holding her wrist in his hands. “That was Dorian’s. The rest was mine.”

“Solas,” she said, studying the little petals, frayed into hearts.

“ _Ara enaste,_ Sene,” he said. “Let it be.”

“What does it mean?” she said.

“It means—” He sighed, now he was thinking. Whatever he was about to say, it was hard for him.

She just waited. He would say it, eventually. She hoped.

“I know we've been off lately,” he said finally, looking at her now. He was very serious. Like a little metal clasp, sealing into her with a click. “And that's okay. It is. I've just been thinking. That I would like to see where you're from, Sene. Your camp, your farm. If that’s all right with you.”

“You would?” she said.

He smiled, seeming relieved that she wasn’t angry. “Yes, Sene,” he said. “I would. When this is all over.”

“Solas,” she said.

“Yes?” he said.

“I don't want to worry you.” She glanced away, a reflex.

"What is it?"

"It's just that my scar's been hurting. Just a little," she said.

He was concerned, chewing that pin, but only just. “Can I see?” he said. She nodded, turned around. He waited for her to untuck her shirt, delicately, and then she folded it up, exposing her skin to the air. She felt his touch, practical, and she knew that he was feeling through it with his magic, however that worked, making sure it was okay. When he was finished, she put her shirt back and turned around.

“Is it okay?” she said.

“It might be the weather,” he said. “That can happen. It seems fine.”

“Good,” she said.

He smiled, and then he pressed his thumb to her wrist, picked it up, and traced his touch up the length of her arm. “You are fine,” he said. His hands were paint-flecked. He pressed his palm to the inside of her elbow, waited.

“It’s been a weird week,” she said.

He nodded again, smoothed his hand to her shoulder, her neck, throat, chin, then he traced his knuckles from her jawline to her hair. “It’s all right,” he said. "Everything is all right."

She thought of Cole then. _Let your actions speak._ She still wasn’t totally sure what this meant. She was only Sene. “We can talk about it if you want,” she said. “Solas.”

But he just shook his head. He had his knuckles at her waistline, grazing the laces where they peaked out from beneath her shirt. “I don’t really want to talk, Sene,” he said. "Unless you do."

“What do you want to do?” she said.

He said nothing.

He felt her watching him as he undid the laces at her waist instead. Heard her breathing, heighten. He wet his fingers with his tongue, and he slid his hand down the front of her pants, and he touched her, deep. It sort of took her by surprise, because it was a surprise, but she was ready. He waited until she closed her eyes and planted her hands to his shoulders, and then he kissed her neck, soft, and he tugged her out of the rotunda, and into the hallway that led to the battlements. It was cold there, but it was quiet, and it was isolated, and it was exactly what they needed. Somewhere new, somewhere real. Doors on all sides like a means to escape, for the both of them. He closed the door behind them, and he pressed her into it, her stance wide as he had two fingers all the way inside of her now, arching high and deep again and again, slowly. She sank against him, almost feline. He braced his left hand to the door behind her, and he leaned in as she clutched to the back of his neck. His breathing was guttural. The paper flower an orange dusting at his jaw.

He kissed her on the mouth and then the fragile tip of her nose as he rocked her there for a long time. He built her, slowly. She said nothing. She was quiet, but she was intense, and her breathing heavy, and soon, she went hard into climax, his mouth at her throat. She trembled. He grunted as he finished her, almost grateful. Delicate. And then finally, she looked at him. Green eyes and curly red hair. The moment hung around them like fog. Slow to dissipate until it was gone, and then he undid his belt, and they had real, speechless sex right there in the hallway against the rotunda door, paint on his hands and face.

What they had realized was that they did need each other, it just wasn’t what they’d thought. And if either of them ever left, it would not be for another. It would be for them, in some capacity. One that no one could possibly understand right now. Because in reality, they only wanted each other, and this was all either of them really needed to know.

When they finished, they got dressed and walked out of the rotunda holding hands. They went down through the garden, said hi to Morrigan, and then they went to the Herald’s Rest. Some of their friends were there, but they had dinner alone, next to a private window and by the light of a candle inside a glass jar, and they talked. Really talked. About nothing, for the first time in a while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **END BOOK II**


	36. Hey, Morrigan. Spin me a tale.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **BOOK III: WINTER**

_A fly in the ointment. A whisper in the shadows._

 

**I. The Eight**

“Mother?” said Kieran.

They were sitting in the back of a covered wagon, on their way to the Emprise du Lion. Morrigan was knitting by the light of an oil lamp. Kieran leaned against her, holding a red ball of yarn.

“Yes, Kieran.”

“Tell me a story,” he said.

Morrigan was knitting a pair of red gloves, for Solas. “What kind of story?” she said.

“One of your Well stories, please. One I have not heard before.”

It was chilly in the wagon. Morrigan reached across Kieran and pulled a wool blanket over them both. “Once upon a time,” she said, “there was an empress in search of a champion.”

"Is this about father?”

“No,” said Morrigan. “Tis a Well story, as requested. Your father was not the only champion in the world."

Kieran smiled. “You are right, mother. Of course. Please go on.”

“Very good.” She continued her knitting. “Once upon a time, there was an empress in search of a champion. She traveled to farms and villages far and wide, throughout the entire kingdom, but none of the men she found were to her liking. They were either too small or too meek, too foolish or too crass. She desired an elegant man, a master of his own invention, a man of his charm, and a man of his own two hands. But these were rare qualities indeed, even then. For a long time, the empress came up short.

“One day, she finally found him. A young man. He was a boxer and a gambler and as tall as a mountain, and very clever. He was strong. His magics were unique, and she'd known his late father _—_ an architect who had used to build her dollhouses when she was a girl. So she approached him one day, the son of the architect, outside the Great Gate of the big city, and outright, she offered him a position in her powerful army. When he asked her why _—_ for he was clever, let us not forget _—_ she told him that he was special, and that there was a war coming, and that if he left with her that very day, he would be granted power, status, and full protection for his widowed mother. The young man thought about it, but he was insolent and brash by his very nature, and eventually, he said no. He would not go with her, and he would not join her army. He did not believe her stories of the coming war. So the empress, who knew good and well how to pick her battles, said, _Very well,_ and she was on her way.

"Three months later, slavers with painted faces from a rival kingdom came to the young man's village. They kidnapped the children and the able, and they killed the old and infirm. When they got to the young man's house, which was on the very outskirts of the village, he had been in the garden with his mother, planting daisies in a large clay pot. The boy’s mother was a talented witch, but she was fragile of the mind. She could not protect herself, so the young man as he had always done _—_ clever fighter that he was _—_ knew that he would have to protect them both. When the slavers came to their door, he first cast a veil around their house. It worked, for a time. But there were twenty of them, and they were grown men and very strong, and eventually, they brought it down. So, next, the young man planted mines by each entrance to the house, all of the doors and windows, even the chimney—fire and ice and moon. When the slavers tried to enter, they were blown to smithereens. But remember, there had been twenty of them, and even with the veil and the mines and the young man, eight still managed to get inside.

"Once they did, the slavers with painted faces took the young man's mother, and they beat him, mercilessly, into unconsciousness. A punishment for his pride. They left him for dead in his garden where he slept for six hours. When he awoke, his face was pummeled, his mother was gone, and his village was destroyed. Fire everywhere. In great rings and pyramids. So the young man sat in the garden and deliberated until sunset. And then, he made a choice.”

Kieran was rapt. He straightened up, his hands tucked in his lap. “What was his choice, mother?”

“I am getting there,” said Morrigan. “After he left his village, the young man went to the empress in her castle on the top of a very high hill. He surrendered himself to her. _I will do what you ask,_ he said, _if you will save my mother’s life._ And that, Kieran, was his choice. Though I doubt he'd refer to it as much.

"In any case, the empress, still enchanted by the young man, got down off her silver throne, and she granted him his trade. She painted his face in her colors, and she made him her champion, and in return, she had his mother stolen into her servitude and placed permanently under her protection. _You will guard my life,_ said the empress to the young man that very night, _and one day, you will be my General._ And so his story began.”

“So his story _began_?” said Kieran. “What does that mean?”

The wagon hit a bump. They shook. “It means exactly what you think it means, Kieran."

“Did the young man have a name?” said Kieran.

“Yes, he did,” said Morrigan, admiring the gloves in her hand—finished now. Finally. They had been a painstaking project indeed. “Though I know not what it was, before. That is the true story of Mythal and the Dread Wolf.”

“The Dread Wolf?” said Kieran. “You mean the elven god? The trickster?”

“Correct,” said Morrigan. “The trickster.”

“I thought he put all the rest of the gods in separate boxes, and that is why everyone is very angry with him.”

“That is exactly what he did,” said Morrigan. “And everyone _is_ very angry with him. But there was a reason he did it.”

“What was the reason?” said Kieran.

“The Dread Wolf was built to General, just as Mythal had promised,” she went on. “But then, his mother died of a broken heart, and Mythal, who could not bear his grief, gifted him his freedom and gave him the power to free others. So began the great slave rebellion of Elvhenan.”

“But why did she do all of those things?” he said. “Why was she so disturbed by his grief?"

“Some of the voices of the Well say that she was in love with him,” said Morrigan. “Others say it was merely his talent that drew her so. Many say that Mythal's love for the Dread Wolf, however it took shape, was ultimately unrequited, that he loved another who, in the end, betrayed them both. Regardless, Mythal was murdered by her enemies, and the Dread Wolf, fueled by vengeance and grief, put the gods into their separate boxes, as you said, and then, he ended the world.”

“That is a very sad story,” said Kieran. “For the Dread Wolf, and for the world.”

“It is, indeed,” said Morrigan.

“What is the Dread Wolf doing now?” said Kieran.

“That much is unclear,” she said, smiling. "The voices know many things, but this, they do not." She fell silent then, listening to the wheels on the wagon as they ground into the dirt.

“Are you all right mother?” said Kieran after a while. Very concerned in his small bird’s heart.

“Yes, Kieran,” she said, once again admiring the red gloves, holding them in her lap. It was the strangest thing, she thought. That somehow, she'd managed to pull Solas's exact measurements from her memory, though she could not remember ever having asked him, or Sene, or having ever held or touched his hands at all. And yet she knew that they were right, and that they would fit him perfectly. She sighed.

“Is it your headaches again?” said Kieran. "They are getting worse, aren't they?"

“Go to sleep,” she said, patting her hand to the pillow. “I will be here when you wake.” She smiled, and so did he, curling against her as she went on with her knitting. And she hummed a stupid song, and then, like children do, hers went to sleep. And he dreamed of the Dread Wolf. Tall as a mountain and filled with sadness. He dreamed of what the Dread Wolf could be doing now.

           

**II. Ordinary People**

Sene and Solas stood at the gates of Sahrnia at sunset, beholding the red rooftops. New paint. The cold was so cold, it could clean out your insides. No wind, no wet that day. Just sun, high and tight, like a fist in the sky. Solas had his arm slung loose around Sene’s shoulders, one of her hairpins clicking around in his teeth.

Sene glanced up at him. “Solas,” she said.

“Yes, vhenan.”

“If you can magic a flower from behind my ear, why can’t you make your own hairpins to chew?”

He smirked.

“Why not?” she said.

“Because then they wouldn’t taste like you,” he said.

She rolled her eyes.

“Move it along, won’t you?” said Dorian, coming up behind them. He clapped his hand to Solas’s shoulder. “I hear they just put a tavern in this Maker-foresaken snow pit. Called it the _Winter Squirrel._ ”

“That’s what they called it?” said Sene.

“You owe me a drink,” said Solas.

“More like ten,” said Dorian. “But who’s counting?”

“Hate this place,” said Sera, cropping up next to Sene. She was warming her hands to her arms, wearing a pair of pink mittens. “Only fucked up stories come out of this place.”

Sene looked up at the big gate, shiny, made of brand new metal. You could hear the people inside the village now, waiting, as Cullen hastened, coordinating their entrance. She grabbed Sera by the ear and kissed her on the cheek.

“What was that for?” said Sera.

“For coming with me,” said Sene.

“I’m freezing my dick off out here,” said Bull. He casually scooped Dorian into his chest with one arm, kissed his forehead. Dorian blushed and smiled. “Boss, when can we go in?”

“Waiting on the word from Cullen,” said Sene.

Solas dropped his hand from her shoulder, found her gloved fingers with his, wove them together. It was like a secret. He was wearing new gloves that day. Winter gloves, red. And Sene was wearing a hat—pink with a poofball sewn to the end, just like Sera's mittens. From Morrigan.

“Well then what the piss is taking so long?” said Sera.

“Perhaps there are demons afoot,” said Solas.

“Demons. _Demons?_ ”

Solas laughed. “You’re extremely naïve for a city elf, Sera."

“Yeah, and what are you?”

“ _Not_ naïve,” he said.

Then. “Inquisitor,” called Cullen, finally, from inside the gate. They all stood at the ready. He was dressed in high, rich armors and had his hand resting on the hilt of his sword.

“Yes, Commander.”

He smiled. A proper man of thirty-one. “We’re good to go.”

 

**III. Pull Up a Chair**

Every time they went to the Emprise du Lion it seemed like a period of growth. Last time, it had come after the Winter Palace. Everybody still squirming into one another like earth worms. Solas and Sene had not been unsullied, but they were mostly unscathed, and it was love before love got scary. But now, they were more than worms. They were roots swimming around among the worms, and it wasn’t just with the two of them. It was everyone. The attachments so deep, it left a barren kind of thinking. You couldn’t focus too hard on the people you loved back then, because you never knew what might happen. There was an answer in booze and knitting. Finding a corner with somebody you desperately needed just to pretend you didn’t need them, and giving gifts, and dropping smiles as the bard sings for pennies. That’s friendship at the end of the world.

That night in the Winter Squirrel Tavern of Sahrnia, Morrigan sat knitting Dorian a muffler in a corner booth while Kieran played with Sera and Bull and Sene at the center of the room. The place was full. There was a singing bard who also told jokes and a great many conversations happening at once. Leliana had come along, too, as there had been whispers of assassination attempts in the more developed parts of Orlais, and though it was unlikely anyone would strike with the Inquisition at such high numbers in a frozen tundra such as this, she wanted to brief her agents and keep an eye on things herself—up close and personal.

Everybody was dressed down. Shirts loose. No armors. Solas and Dorian sat at the bar, Solas with his whiskey and Dorian with his wine. They were always coming up with new ways to explain things to one another. Only it wasn't just bravado anymore. It was something else entirely that neither of them was quite prepared to acknowledge, not yet.

“It has occurred to me,” said Dorian at some point, leaning with his chin in his hand, “that, other than the fact you’re woefully arrogant, and you’re in love with the Inquisitor, and your magic is breathtaking in its brute simplicity, I know next to nothing about you, dear apostate. How can that be?”

“What would you like to know,” said Solas, sipping his whiskey. He’d always preferred dark liquor. Clean and strong.

“Your parents,” he said. “What do they do?”

“My parents are dead,” said Solas. "They have been for some time."

It was nonchalant. Unexpected.

Dorian got quiet. “I’m very sorry, Solas. I didn’t know.”

“Of course you didn’t,” said Solas. “It’s all right, Dorian.”

“What _did_ they do?” said Dorian. “Before they—I’m terribly sorry. If you don’t mind my asking.”

“Not at all,” said Solas. “My mother was a healer. My father was an architect.”

“An architect?”

“Yes.”

“Fascinating.”

“Potentially.”

“And Sene’s family,” he said, “—or, her clan. What is their deal, again? I’m sure she must have told me before, but I always manage to forget these sorts of things. Wonderful friend that I am.”

"The Lavellans are grain farmers,” said Solas.

“Dalish grain farmers? Are you certain?”

Solas nodded, swigging the last of his whiskey. He set the heavy glass down on the bar. “And vintners. They’re extremely rich for Dalish elves. They are not migratory.”

“Vintners, too?” Dorian swished the wine around in his glass, examining the color. “Not sure how I missed that. I’d like to pick her brain.”

Solas smiled. “Sene knows next to nothing about wine, I assure you. She was their lead huntress. Though she could show you how to properly skin a bear in under an hour, if you asked.”

“Well, that would be useful,” said Dorian. “And the woman does know expensive fabrics. Perhaps her secret Dalish money could explain as much?”

“Perhaps.”

“Do you have plans to visit?” said Dorian. “Free Marches, is it?”

Solas nodded, staring at his hands. The bartender came to refill his glass. He smiled in gratitude. “Ansburg,” he said. “Soon. I hope."

“Very good,” said Dorian, finishing his wine. “Excellent plan indeed.”

He gestured for the bartender to refill his glass as well. He seemed nervous all of a sudden.          

Solas glanced. “Everything all right?”

Dorian looked over his shoulder. Bull was wearing a great orange knit cardigan, and he had Kieran on his shoulders now. Kieran was sweeping the cobwebs out of one of the corners of the bar with a broom, finding a great deal of fun in this. Sene and Sera and Morrigan sat in that nearby corner booth, watching, laughing with pretty mouths and features. “That is an odd child,” said Dorian.

“He’s the son of a hedge mage and a Grey Warden who martyred himself to save the world,” said Solas. “He’s since spent half his life raised by elven servants in the Winter Palace. You’d be odd as well.”

“You have a point.” Dorian sipped his wine, carefully. The bard changed songs. He cleared his throat. “Solas,” he said. Like a wager.

“Yes, Dorian.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Of course."

“How did you _—_ or, _she_ , perhaps." He was fussing with one of the rings on his fingers. “Oh, blessed Andraste.”

“What is it?”

“Visiting Sene’s family,” he said. “Was it her idea, or yours?”

"Ah," said Solas. He smirked. “It was mine."

“I see,” said Dorian.

“Are you thinking of inviting Bull home to meet your parents?”

Dorian sighed, exasperated. “I would love to,” he said. “My mother at least. There have been letters of late, indicating her...surprisingly unconditional interest in my life here. I am not sure how to proceed."

"That sounds like a good thing," said Solas.

"Yes, well. Considering the former strivings of my father, there are still obvious complications.” He took a drink, scratched an itch on his forehead. “Very obvious. Like a hornets nest of complications, actually.”

Solas sighed. “You’re a good man Dorian,” he said, taking a drink.

“Tell me something I don't know, apostate."

“You're a good man, and so is Bull, and that will always be true, no matter what.”

Dorian stopped fussing with his jewelry after this. He was waiting for the amusing punchline. When one never came, he became bashful. He put down his guard _—_ just for the moment _—_ and smiled. “Thank you," he said softly. "You always do know what to say, Solas, and how to make a lasting impression."

"I am a man of many talents," said Solas.

Kieran had begun to sing along with the bard now, still on Bull's shoulders, holding tight to his horns. Several of the local women were clapping along.

"I imagine it should be easy for you then," said Dorian. "Meeting Sene's clan.”

Solas brought the glass to his lips, shook his head. "Don't be so sure."

"Oh?"

“I may be an elf, Dorian, but I am still an apostate, and I am not Dalish. Sene’s clan is provincial. And given her status, and her youth, I’m sure they'll have plans for her once this is all over. I’ll be seen as an interloper, and nothing more.”

“My word,” said Dorian.

“I agree.”

“Would they attempt to control her like that? Truly?”

“I am not entirely sure,” said Solas. “I know only what I can guess, based on what she tells me.”

“What who tells you?”

It was Sene. She sat down on the stool on the other side of Solas and grinned. Her hair big and tamed back with a pretty green headband given to her by Morrigan. She put her elbows on the bar and ordered a glass of wine.

“Hello, vhenan,” he said.

“Hello, Solas,” she said. She looked at Dorian. “Hello, Dorian.”

“Hello, Sene.”

The bartender was not faceless. She said hello to him, too. He blushed, a tall thing with blond hair. Very young. Maybe even younger than Sene. He poured her wine from a green bottle, and he nodded, bashful, in return. "Your worship."

“On that note,” said Dorian, finishing his glass and getting up from his stool, “I shall leave the two of you to your frolics.”

“No,” said Sene. “Stay.”

“Do not worry, dear Inquisitor,” he said. “I will be back.” He winked, then he went off to Bull, debonair, and straightened up his collar.

Once he was gone, Solas casually reached over to drag Sene’s stool about a foot closer to his. It took him very little effort. They sat together, touching knees. They didn't talk, not right away.

He finished his whiskey and, at some point, nudged her knee with his. "I like that thing in your hair," he said, studying the empty glass in his hands.

She smiled and blinked. She took a sip of her wine, nudged him back. "Thanks."

           

**IV. One Butterfly in a Jar**

That night, they all slept in the Inn next to the tavern—Sene and her inner circle. There were twenty Inquisition soldiers outside, surrounding the building, kicking around in the freezing cold dirt, on guard. You could hear them talking late into the evening about deep and meaningful subjects.

 _I’d like to take a ride on a ship some day,_ said one.

 _The Waking Sea is something to swim in,_ said another.

“Solas,” Sene breathed.

He had a grip on her from behind, mouth on the skin between her shoulder blades. “I know,” he said. Losing his breath. He was close. “ _A_ _vise’ain_. I know.”

He drank from her so deeply those days, almost like in the beginning. Mountains. Tent. Earth. Bed. Everywhere. _All hands and antlers,_ as Sera would say. They sexed constantly.

At some point, however, on their ride into the Emprise du Lion, they had made the decision, together, that he would no longer finish inside her. That they would save this, that they would be cautious. And in some ways, this discussion had made them even closer, as it brought along with it certain unspoken implications that filled them both with need and joy. A happy life. A pretty garden. Somebody new to carry the torch, to tell their story long after they were both gone from this world and just two sets of bones buried in the same wooden box.

When they were finished and cleaned up and it was time for sleep, Sene put her head to his chest so that she could hear the vibrations in his voice. She asked him if he would tell her about Arlathan.

“It was a dark, feral beauty in its prime,” he said to her, his hands deep in her hair. He’d put a butterfly in a jar, left it sitting on the table for light. “The women wore hats that looked like birds. The men wore suspenders. There were so many people. The buildings were very tall. Like mirrors in the sky. And the downtown was a gray-brick wind tunnel. If you got trapped during a storm, there was a chance you’d blow away.”

She smiled. “That’s all I want,” she said. “Don’t say anything else. Not tonight.”

“Okay, vhenan,” he said.

Sene’s love was shapeless as he held her in the sheets of their room. It went everywhere and all at once like a huge white light flooding the windows of a foundry. But the years had rendered Solas a man of discipline. His focus, once he set it, was pure. She was avoiding the truth. Both of them knew this. She knew that it was bigger than anything she wanted at the moment. Bigger than her. Bigger than the both of them. She was not afraid, but there had to be a reason that he was there—that he was with her. At all. She was not stupid. She was just not ready to know. She wanted to live in this place with him, just a little while longer. Sleeping in an inn, the blankets itchy, the sheets worn, threadbare. She wanted him in small places, new places where they had never been before, where they could get a little dirty, and never look back. And he wanted her to have these things for as long as she needed them.

In the language of the people, _sule’din_ translates directly to _unto death._ Sene would not say it out loud, but she was not ready for that place either—those wolves who wanted to come and drag her back into the dark again. Suledin Keep. Too much had happened. The only things she wanted to do now were for love.

 

**V. Oh, How I Forgot What It’s Like**

They put down the first dragon easy enough. Like a flash in the pan. It struck too quickly, had poor peripheral vision. Sera had insisted on coming along, and so there were five of them. In the wide open ring, the job was easy. They were only getting started it seemed.

But after the second, the dust cleared, and Sene saw Solas stumble to his knees. There was a lot of blood on one side of his face and staining the pale furs of his armor. When she got there, he was keeled over, disoriented, coughing into the snow and beating his fists into the earth. He’d taken a bad hit. Shrapnel to the chest when the dragon last landed, and then he went into the ground hard. His staff was in his hand still. Sene eased his grip and tossed it and tipped him over so that he was on his side, his head in her lap.

Life is a terrible joke sometimes, she thought. One moment, your lover is inside you, and he's telling you all about the ancient, crystal pillars of his childhood, and the next, he is in your arms, gasping for breath and bleeding from the head. Only she wasn't really thinking any of this. It was just the truth.

"It's okay," she said, taking off her gloves so she could use them to stop the bleeding. "It'll be okay."

Once he lost consciousness, she screamed for Dorian.

On his knees beside them, Dorian studied. He was calm. The cut to the side of Solas’s head was deep, splitting from about the corner of his eyebrow down to the crook of his ear, but this was not all of it.

“Sene,” said Dorian. “ _Sene._ ”

By this point, Sene had frozen. Her hair was like a mask. She was far away.

“Andraste save us all,” said Sera, clutching herself, covered in blood. “I hate this fucking place.” She put her hands on Sene’s shoulders, shook hard. “Quiz. Quiz, _please_.”

“Yes,” she said.

The Iron Bull knelt beside her. He put his hand on her shoulder. “Stay with us, Boss,” he said. He looked at Dorian. “Kadan.”

Dorian, concentrating, nodded once. He asked Sene to ease Solas onto his back.

She cried as she did it. Cold and stifled. He was so heavy and tall. So solid, and the leather and the fur added all this extra bulk. The world was quiet. If you had been anybody else, you might have thought it was beautiful. But the wind was like knives, and if you listened real close, you could hear that third dragon in the distance, moaning. There was fire everywhere. The afternoon sky a vast, unflinching enemy. Solas stirred. The leather from his boots scraped against the ice. His breath ragged, he reached for her, held her wrist in his gloved hand, but he was not awake.

“Shite,” said Sera, right next to Sene. She helped. She always helped. “Oh, Solas. Wake up."

“What’s wrong with him?” said Sene, very quiet. “Can you see?”

“His ribs are broken,” said Dorian, feeling a hand gently over Solas’s right side. “Two of them. I can sense it. And he’s severely concussed. His breathing is odd. We should get him to the keep.”

“Can’t you just fix it?” said Sera. “Like he fixed Sene?”

Dorian shook his head. “This is not the kind of thing one uses magic to fix, Sera,” he said. “I would only cause more damage. He needs a healer.”

All at once, Sene broke down. She was convinced he couldn't breathe and rushed to loosen the laces of his jacket, the furs at his collar. Frantic. She held his head in her hands. Bull put his arm around her shoulders, but it just felt like rocks. She was choking. “ _F_ _uck_ ,” she whispered.

Nobody said or did anything. The dragon, meanwhile, was huge and dead in the background, the steam rising off its body in silence, and everything reeking of blood.

Dorian picked up Solas’s wrist, felt his pulse, closed his eyes.

“Just a scratch,” he said quietly to the apostate. Sene sobbed. "Just a scratch, my friend."

 

**VI. Tells**

“I believe this game is mine,” said Cullen, leaning back in his chair, quite pleased with himself. The day was clear. The courtyard, green. Soldiers and Chantry sisters seemed to be everywhere, everybody holding either weapons or candles. Take your pick, you're probably right. Suledin Keep was a developed place, and very rich. Merchants and even nobility from Val Royeaux often came simply to view its majesty. Forget the red lyrium giants or Imshael and his demon brood. The battlement where Sene almost died had been been constructed to boast a crow’s nest and one bright and beautiful Inquisition flag. Home sweet home.

The chessboard, a wash. Leliana rolled her eyes. “Enjoy victory while you can, Commander. We have all day. And I demand a rematch.”

Cullen smirked, leaned forward to reset the board. Then, he became serious. “Thank you for this, Leliana,” he said.

“For what, Commander?”

“For providing me with distraction. A day like this, with Sene and the others…” he trailed off, sighed, scratched at the back of his neck. He placed the queens and the kings. The knights and the rooks.

Leliana leaned back in her chair. Arms crossed over her chest. This was a tell. She watched him closely. "You are worried, Commander."

"Of course I am," he said.

"About her," she said. "Specifically."

He glanced up. “Excuse me?"

"About Sene."

"She is the Inquisitor," said Cullen, one big hand on the table. "It is my job to worry about Sene."

"Of course it," said Leliana, smirking. "And she makes it easy for you, doesn't she? All that red hair. Green eyes. Those freckles. She’s like some sort of goddess.”

"Sene is not a goddess,” said Cullen, mildly defensive. “She is a merciful woman. She’s been patient with me. A good friend. That is all.”

“Does it ever get to you?”

“Does what ever get to me?"

“Solas,” said Leliana. “That lazy smirk of his. Hedge mage with a mysterious past. How he holds her with such casual possession. It is a rare quality in a man, don’t you think? To be at once so wise, and so young. Impervious. All the world like dust in his palm.”

“Don’t make this something it isn’t,” he said, very stern, built up from nothing. She could sense his edges, sharp and poking out from under all those ruffled feathers. "I'm serious, Leliana. Let it be."

“I am teasing,” she said, straight-faced. “It is a test. You must learn to hide your tells, Commander, or else they’ll bite you in the end.”

He glanced away. The tension broke. “I am not so hardened,” he said.

Leliana leaned in, elbows on the table. “We all think we’re tougher than we are, Commander."

A Chantry sister whooshed by. She was giving a tour to a dignitary with a sour, pinched face.

"I used to think I was," said Cullen. "Hardened."

"Once, when I was a girl," she said, "I shot an arrow into the hide of a deer. I shot that arrow, certain I would miss, and when I did not, and the deer died, I was devastated. I cried myself to sleep for a week.”

“You, devastated over the death of a deer?”

“I am not so hardened,” she said, eyebrows raised. “If I were, I would not be here with you, looking after our Inquisition—a band of children, it seems. Jumping in the leaves.”

“They deserve their fun,” he said, focusing on her. “They risk a great deal.”

“You are very good at your job,” she said. "Do not let yourself think otherwise."

"I appreciate that."

"As you should," she said. “Now. Your move, or mine?”

Cullen leaned back in his chair, crossed one leg over the other. He surveyed the board.

“Ladies first,” he said.

She cracked her knuckles. “You learn quick.”

There was a commotion at the gate then. Everything stopped. A flock of bright red birds picked up from the courtyard and flew away in a single mass.

"So soon?" said Leliana.

They stared at one another. Two tacticians weighing the odds in their hands.

They both rose from their seats. Something was the matter.

 

 **VII. My Baby Saved the World**   _  
_

It wasn't long then.

He put the hat on his head and leaned against the lamp post on the corner of Wind of Winter. He wore a long, black jacket. He dipped the joint and ground it to the sidewalk with the steel toe of his boot.

The city streets were dead everywhere. Loose leaves blowing in circles as the tree branches scraped. The people hid in their fox holes. Bare-faced, as he'd made this place a sanctuary, and when the parade of evil arrived, he snapped his fingers once and brought down the sky in spikes. Pale, angry screeching. The eagles dove off the rooftops like savage beasts. He was so rarely amused in those days and bent like a husk. The rest of them couldn’t touch this place, and he came back every so often to make sure they didn’t try.

Mythal watched from up ahead _—_ she was always watching _—_ standing in the middle of the empty, gray street in her dress made of gold, her brown hair pulled high and smooth off her face, her great blue sword dragging on the stone cobble behind her. _Come along, Fen'Harel,_ she said when the dust had cleared. The city was in ashes, and he protected it still. Together they found a mirror and went back to his hidden castle in the mountains where they slept whenever times got rough. The clouds came, and then the lightning, and then the rains. A master of his own invention. Tall as a mountain still. He always handed her his gloves whenever they were home and he had finished with his business for the day. She would hold them for a moment before setting them on the mantle, leather and heavy and black, memorizing, weighing them in her hands.

 

Now, the champion stirred in the bed with the high, brass posts. He'd gotten wiped out on the battlefield, and he couldn’t wake. Swimming in the tar pits of time, he knew that he was sleeping. In his chest, an axe. But there was a familiar longing inside his heart, and just like anything familiar in a time of confusion, he went right to it. It was in the wrong direction. But what is a memory anyway, other than that feeling you get when it's first produced? He wanted comfort. He found it, somewhere. There were voices inside.

 _All the men who’ve touched me were brute about it_ , said the empress. He watched her staring at the candles on the wall. They burned in strange patterns, flashing orange across her cheeks. The room was full of cold windows and he had not seen her in a million years. _I've never been with a man who was gentle, who cared about what I wanted._

So he made her look at him. _Would you like to be?_ he said. He put the hair behind her ear.

She said yes, and he kissed her.

 _In some ways_ , he thought, _my entire life could be summed up by this one single gesture._ It was almost laughable. Put the hair behind the girl's ear, make her feel special. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Until.

 

“When will he wake up?” said Sene, standing in the corner with her arms crossed over her chest. "Dorian?"

"There’s no telling."

The room was dark, but the hearth was warm. Dorian had conjured a lantern, which sat on the table by the door. Dorian conjured beautiful fire. It was bright orange and very rich. But it was not a butterfly.

Morrigan was there, too. She stood by Solas’s bedside, holding his gloves. This had been a massive shock. Nobody knew what to do. The other advisors were in disarray. She had come to the keep because she had more knitting to give, and she planned to meet Solas so she could ask him about her headaches, as they really were getting worse, and they had been going on for more than a week, and she thought he might know what was causing them. He was good at things like that. Arrogant and a little brash she thought, but he always proved most capable, and as a partner to Sene he seemed deeply attentive in ways that she could now only imagine.

Morrigan turned to Sene, a gentle hand. "Do not fear, child," she said and handed her the red gloves. "Solas is strong, and he knows what to do. 'Tis only a matter of time."

Sene looked up at Morrigan, green eyes behind a very thick fog. "Thank you," she said.

Morrigan smiled. She had always liked knitting. It cleared her head. Ever since she was a girl and she would make secret mittens and colorful scarves and sneak into the cities where she would trade them for little bottles of perfume or bundles of exotic flowers dried upside-down and perfectly preserved. She, too, had known the love of a champion at the end of the world. Hadn't they all? It felt important, this idea of preservation, of memory, of knitting, stitching them all together as Solas lie injured in Suledin Keep. Because, in truth, it was all starting to come apart now, for Morrigan.

 _His hands_ , she thought. _Whatever the cost, please just don't let me forget his hands._ His hands.

 

* * *

 

_High up in her bone tower, Mythal watched, as usual. Tick-tock. She'd seen each of these events as they unfolded through her winter window, built for her by Fen'Harel and his own two hands. Sometimes, she could still feel them, his hands, if she gathered her focus and concentrated hard enough on the past.  
_

_All the world was a story that she could not write anymore. Full of friends forever who she loved and who loved each other, but always with a dull sadness attached, some meaningless bullshit like dragons and shadows, and she did not understand. But she was hungry for touch, and she was filled with love and she was filled with despair and rage and anger and jealousy and joy. So that day, Mythal, opened her window. She had never done this before, had never known that she could, but there was a first time for everything, even for an ancient, aging creature such as herself. She picked up her gold dress, and she hopped onto the white, winter sill. All the world in pieces, she thought, legs dangling over the the edge. All she needed was a push.  
_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More Arlathan can be found in _[Teen Wolf](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8623606/chapters/19773958)_. This is, of course, just a recommendation and always optional.
> 
> Thank you for reading:-) -gala


	37. Entropy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chimney falls and lovers blaze  
> Thought that I was young
> 
> -Neko Case, _[I Wish I Was the Moon](https://open.spotify.com/track/4PxzGOH79jcmmldKgoI9sB) ___

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _cw: some light suicide ideation ___

Mythal, as a very rich woman, had always been a collector of rarities. Fine tables and fine china. Tea cups cut from elemental brass, pale Antivan silks, butterflies. Jewels and relics, sand and sea. But her most prized collection, and the collection she was known for in all the kingdoms of all the land, was her collection of elegant men. Men of stature, men of grace. To Mythal, the entire concept of  _men_ was a thing of mathematical genius. In order to protect, a man needed first to be protected from himself, and there was nothing more beautiful than striking such a delicate balance between purpose and need. And yet, just like with anything, a man of true value was rare. Money and importance did not make an elegant man. Elegant men were born. Elegant men were spontaneously dropped into the world by fate alone. They needed to be discovered. They needed to be curated, acquired, and as anything of unique value, carefully maintained.

From the time she groomed and fully inherited control of her family’s faction at the age of twenty-two, Mythal had collected hundreds of these elegant men. She combed through the villages, the rural districts, and the Backwater by the sea for the gems lost to the stone. She’d put them into her army, and she’d teach them about the finer things in life. How to pour your whiskey. How to smoke your drugs. She made them connoisseurs, made them _better_ than they were _._ And she called them her Sentinels, and as great pyramids of justice and testaments to her family’s power, she arranged them proudly at her doorstep and at each of her borders. Disciplined and loyal and elegant men.

In contrast to her habits of collection, Mythal did not sleep with elegant men. In fact, Mythal only slept with simplistic men. She was not sure why this was. She could not help but attract them: crass and brute and typically drunk, nobles with chiseled, mean faces who held an interest in her body alone. As if it were a mere puddle, or a tree branch. Something to be messed up and used and broken in two. She was a former debutante of some contest, and so she could not for the life of her understand this sorry path she’d gotten down. To be so valuable, and yet lack so much worth? At some point, her inability to sleep with a man who cared about her desires or her satisfaction made her think that, despite her status and her own particular elegance, she must have somehow been naïve. There was nothing worse than a naïve woman, thought Mythal. _Just throw me off a cliff and hang me by the neck_. Therefore, in her early twenties, Mythal developed a tremendous amount of anxiety. She took to drinking and smoking to stave off the winter, alone in the aviary as her hands shook. But winter was a season born in her blood. She often wanted to die.

So to fix this, she stopped sleeping with men. Despite her neurosis, Mythal was not a weak woman, and she knew how to solve a problem with some resolve, so she did not sleep with men, and she did not sleep with anyone for a long, long time, and instead, she mothered men, and she projected herself as cold and distant, a nuturer to those who loved her, and merciless in the face of antagonism. She became known for her quiet yet ruthless usurpations of enemy paths, and she continued to grow her insidious army of Sentinels, and she fed them and housed them in the most upright towers, and she gave them exquisite armors made of gold, and when she was twenty-six, and it seemed she had collected all the elegance in all the world to claim, she acquired the crown jewel—Fen’Harel.

From the very moment he entered her service, there were rumors about Mythal and Fen’Harel. Their relationship, what it was, what it meant. He appeared with her everywhere: tall and explosive in his demeanor, outfitted in the furs of silver wolves, carrying a huge staff that doubled as a scythe. Descendant of an old, dead dynasty of bald elves that had, in its prime, been responsible for erecting the now-defunct castles floating in the sky over Arlathan, Fen’Harel, in blood alone, was worth more than his stature. Builders and planners, his people were big, and strong, and ceaselessly enchanting. They walked in dreams, and they were bred to be smart and to manipulate the physics of the land, but their intelligence was pure of intention, and this precluded them from raising a competitive warrior class. They thought they could win wars on their elegance alone. But once the Old War of the people came, their line was depleted in a single generation, and any remainder scattered to the wind. After a while, there was nobody left to keep the floating castles in working order anymore. They just hung up there now, sad ruins in the clouds, vacant and run down, their scaffoldings raining on the sea. It was tragic. And over time, through much convincing and noble propaganda, most people came to believe those ruins were products of the Old Gods and their vile temperaments alone. Everybody forgot the truth. Except Mythal.

Fen’Harel, or Solas, as she knew him, was a true, true rarity. The blood of ancient builders mixed with the blood of cut throat nobility. Though he was not entirely aware, his warrior prowess did not come from his father. And so Mythal collected him, and then she collected all of the books containing all of the knowledge of his heritage and the heritage of his dead father, and she hid them in the library of her Blue Fortress for safe keeping. The Blue Fortress—castle where she grew up, the place where, for five years, she lived with her rare-breed warrior, his widowed mother, their three hundred servants, and an entire battalion of Sentinels who slept in the garden barracks underground. The Blue Fortress fell when Arlathan fell, not long after the death of Solas’s mother. It was at this time that Mythal liberated Solas, and the two of them moved in secret, south to the fortress we now know as Skyhold, and together, plotted his rebellion.

But while many thought the two were intimate from the very beginning, this just was not true. They were friends, their attachment unique. Solas, in all of his bravado and strength and sensitivity, made Mythal feel safe. So she loved him like a son, and this provided him with purpose, as Solas liked to feel needed, required it, in fact, as a prerequisite to living, even then. Their co-dependence made them stronger, for a little while. Further, and perhaps most importantly to Solas, Mythal worshiped his mother, her quiet power, her warmth, her decided bravery to leave it all behind for a bald, merchant-class architect of ancient, secret value. She and Solas bonded over this, and in the highest reaches of her Blue Fortress, Mythal had built for Leanathy a private garden that she alone could tend and explore.

The affair between Mythal and the man known as Fen’Harel did not begin until he became her General at the age of twenty-three. Mythal was barely thirty. The night in question is one that would be forgotten by legend, just like so many other truths over the years and would be remembered by the two of them alone and perhaps rightly so. Though the act itself had been nothing extraordinary—no life and death, no fanfare, just a natural progression of the body and the heart in a time of war.

 

When needs meet whims. Love comes in many shapes and formulas.

 

“There is no deal on the Backwater,” said Solas, chewing a piece of bark from  the garden. They’d both been there earlier that day, standing beside the high, green fountain with their hands on the stone. They were speaking with his mother on the quality of the water there. She had made a tree of ice right next to the nasturtium, and its branches were filled with singing, yellow birds. Leanathy merely held the watering can, but Solas and Mythal looked upon that tree with wild excitement in their eyes.

Now, he was sitting in the parlor across a heavy table from the noble son of plenty, Elgar’nan. Elgar’nan was a great and remarkable savage. Bearded and younger than he looked, but the years and the drugs had not been easy on him. There was very little mercy in those days, and he was there because he wanted negotiations per Mythal’s territory in the Backwater strip out by the sea. Given their alliance, Solas, raised to General not three months before, almost thought this comical. Mythal sat beside him at the table, hands clasped demurely in her lap, lashes long, brown hair pulled back tight. She, of course, would not speak for herself in the company of men like Elgar’nan, and Solas was more than willing to do the speaking for her.

Elgar’nan glanced at Mythal. “You agree to this?”

She stared at him, down the long, straight bridge of her nose. “These are my General’s terms,” she said, smiling pleasantly. “Please address him if there is anything else you wish to discuss this evening.”

Solas smirked, both hands on the table.

Elgar’nan spat at this and stood from his chair. He was outright huge. All of his movements were like this loud, very massive supermovements. He preferred sweaters made of golden thread and had a taste for sad country whores. His Lieutenants, which he kept in small numbers and always by his side were tall and strong and mean like he was, even the women, but they were all afraid of Solas. Everybody was afraid of Solas.

Except Elgar’nan.

He sat back down at the table, anted up. “Man to man,” he said to Solas. “What do you want for the Backwater?”

“There is no deal on the Backwater,” said Solas. “Ask for something else.”

“I have Falon’din on retainer, _”_ said Elgar’nan. “He has a gift for turning bandits into soldiers, and there are a great many bandits in the Backwater, wouldn’t you say, Fen’Harel?”

“I believe I’ve made myself perfectly clear,” said Solas. “And I must also ask you not to speak to me about Falon’din. Last time he was here, he put a boot into my servant’s throat and started a riot in the kitchens. I’d tell you of his punishment, but I’m sure he’d prefer to tell you himself. A man only has so much pride to give, wouldn’t you say, Elgar’nan?”

Elgar’nan paused. He lit a massive joint of elfroot and proceeded to smoke it, ashing directly onto the table. He cracked his knuckles. Dipped the joint and discarded it to the floor. “Attack dogs don’t make decisions,” he said finally. This was his first mistake, though none could say it was intentional. “You speak for your empress. What does _she_ want? What can I give to _her_.”

Solas steadied himself, studied his hands. He began to adjust the hemlines of his leather gloves, a subtlety of his very own. “Ah yes,” he said. “The attack dog bit.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I don’t believe I’ve ever heard that one before,” said Solas _. "_ Tell me, are you sure you were born to your mantle, Elgar’nan? Because if I didn’t know any better, I’d swear you earned it on cleverness alone.”

There was a scuffle then. Elgar’nan reached across the table with some unseen quickness and took Solas by the throat. By this point in the the Great War, everybody was so drunk on power and boredom, magic had become passe, and violence was more fun. Elgar’nan had Solas by ten years and thirty pounds, and it wasn’t long before he had lunged over the table completely and put Solas onto his back, on the floor. Knee to the chest, desperately lacking in amusement and reeking of grain liquor.

Mythal was unhappy.

“Elgar’nan,” she said calmly from her seat. “You handle your ally with a great deal of indiscretion.”

 _"_ You are my ally,” he said. “Not him.”

 _"_ That is your second mistake on the hour,” she said. “Do you wish to make a third?”

"Don’t tempt me,” he said.

 _"_ As you wish,” she said.

Solas struggled, hard. But he eventually got a hold of Elgar’nan’s jaw. He threw the great brute back so that his head made contact with the table. It was loud, unsettling. Solas got to his feet and spat the bits of bark to the floor. He was pissed off. “We’re through here,” he said, peeling off his gloves. “Give Elgar’nan my regards as soon as he regains his faculties.” Mythal stood quickly. He handed her his gloves, and then he was on his way.

Now, he sat in her quarters, smoking by the window, waiting for her to return from the parlor. Damage control was Mythal’s specialty, and this was their routine. He had a good view of the old train yard where he’d used to hang out with Ghilan’nain. He counted the upturned cars like sad rectangles, stacked side-by-side, and proceeded to listen for the trains. They ran at odd intervals those days. But before long, he could hear their moanings in the distance like lone, hungry beasts, and Solas felt like one of them, his heart stretched thin, full of trash and loose teeth, but no matter how he tried, he could not get it to empty. So he sat and he smoked and he worked desperately to get high, but his head was too thick already, and the drugs weren’t strong enough, and so he tossed the joint and shook out his knuckles and started peeling at the white paint on the window sill.

The room was dim. He’d lit it himself the moment he’d arrived with cold candles dressed in different colors. Mythal was enchanted by these sorts of magical rarities, and he'd used to light the room with butterflies like at his old house in the Weathers, but lately, he couldn't bring himself to make the butterflies anymore. He wasn't sure why. It was like that piece of his magic had gone dormant or just felt very, very sore. And though he knew that, like most girls, Mythal liked the butterflies best of all, she never requested them once they stopped appearing, and she seemed to understand perfectly the reason for their absence, even if Solas did not understand it perfectly himself. She was content with the cold candles and even commented on them often, and for this kindness, Solas was always surprised. It's not that Mythal was unkind. It was just that he was so used to accommodating her, that any time she showed accommodation to him, it was like he didn't know what to do. It threw things off-balance. It was a change.

When Mythal came in, finally, she was exasperated, and this was terribly unusual.

Solas turned his head to look at her. “What’s the story?” he said.

“You should have just let him have the Backwater, Solas.” She shook out her hair, leaving her jacket in an aching, silver pile on the floor. “Elgar’nan is a difficult motherfucker, and I am not in the mood.”

“Give him the Backwater?” said Solas. “Are you serious?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“A number of your Sentinels still have families in the Backwater. You’d let them live there in relative, protected peace for four years, only then to sell their land to a tyrant because you’re not _in the mood_? What’s the matter with you?”

She sighed then, huge. The candles dimmed and flickered, and then she went to the armoire—all painted with pictures of dragons and winter berries and little onions etched in brass—and she took out the ice-colored robe. It was a familiar piece and she wore it most nights, especially in the summer months. Solas liked it, because it reminded him of water. She put it on, and he watched from the corner of his eye as she went to the vanity.

“He’s still down there,” she said finally, removing her earrings one by one. “Harassing my servants. Kicking the dogs.”

“I’ll deal with him.”

“No,” she said, glancing over her shoulder. “You’ve done enough dealing for one day, Solas. It’s being handled.”

“Why won’t you negotiate with him yourself?” he said. “You act as though you’re afraid.”

“He does not respect me.”

“Well, that’s bullshit.”

“You have your charm, Solas,” she said. “He is desperately jealous of this. It puts him off guard. He has always wanted to be bright, like his younger brother. The one who died in the battle with June out on Shale Avenue. He used to magic me little tea cups out of the morning glories that grew in my mother’s flower box. He was too young to die.”

“Elgar’nan is not an imbecile,” said Solas. “He’s just used to submission in his presence. He would compromise with you, but with me, he is territorial. He wants fists.” He dipped the joint, dead between his fingers. “In any case, I am through dispatching of animals in your parlor, Mythal. If the man won’t have a discussion, then he won’t be invited back.”

“I have already told him as much,” she said. She came over then and stood beside the table. She looked down at him, her brown eyes scribbly and deconstructed from the day. “Are you going out?” she said.

“No,” he said, glancing out the window. “This city is like roadkill. I can’t take it anymore.”

She was surprised by this. He had always used to love the city. She sat down in the blue chair across from him. The table was round and cobbled together from green jewels of winter. A gift from her mother, another rarity she did not need but looked marvelous in any case. “Solas,” she said.

“What,” he said.

“There is a reason he is like this.” She folded her hands in her lap, looked down at her thumbs, the nails painted a pale shade of purple.

“What reason?” said Solas.

“Nobody else knows,” she said.

“Knows what?”

“That, at one point in my life, I was supposed to marry him,” she said, leaning now with her elbows on the table. She put her chin in her hands. “It’s so stupid. When I was nineteen, it was arranged. But I threatened to burn down the belfry, and my parents knew better than to play the odds.”

Solas found this amusing. He lit another joint from a bit of flame cupped in his hand. “My father built that belfry,” he said, shaking the fire from his palm. He blew three smoke rings into the air.

“I know,” she said.

He leaned back, studied her. When he saw her blushing, he smirked. “Why didn’t you want to marry him, Mythal?”

“Why do you think, Solas?”

“Psychotic asshole comes to mind.”

“You know, he wasn’t always like this,” she said. She swept the hair off her face. She had these wide brown eyes that could suck the daylight like tar pits. But they were beautiful, too, in a sort of unsettling way that made Solas want to eat them. “He used to be sweet. When we were kids, he would pick his mother’s blackberry bush clean just for me.”

“You think that makes him sweet,” said Solas, “because he brought you blackberries. Was this more or less appealing than his brother who conjured you tea cups out of your mother's flower box?”

“I’m sure you made similar offerings to Ghilan’nain in your country youth.”

“I made much better offerings than blackberries and tea cups, I assure you.”

She waved a hand. “You think you’re better than other men.”

“I am better than other men,” said Solas. He took a drag, let the smoke spill out of his mouth at a slow seep. “That’s why I’m here.”

In a lazy gesture then he offered her the joint.

She gave him a look.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

“We’ve been at this for four years,” she said. “You’ve never once offered me your drugs before.”

“I’m bored,” he said.

“You’re always bored.”

“Not like this.” He set the joint between his lips, rolled his head back against the chair and closed his eyes. “I’m so bored. My brain—it feels like it’s filling with sand.”

Mythal understood this. “Where do you get them?” she said.

“Get what, Mythal?”

“Your drugs.”

He peaked at her out of one eye. “One of your Sentinels grew up on an artisanal elfroot farm,” he said. “He has an ample supply. I pay him triple, so I get first pick of the crop.”

“You are talking about Sorrow.”

“I am.”

“Sorrow deals you your _artisanal_ elfroot?”

“He prefers Abelas,” he said. “But yes.”

“I see,” she said, examining her knuckles. “His farm—it’s one of the two dozen or so in the Backwater.”

“I have been there on multiple occasions,” said Solas. “It is small, but something to see.”

“He is only seventeen,” she said, becoming dour. She reached into the pocket of her pale blue robe and withdrew a large coin made of silver. She studied it in her hand. “Sorrow. This horrible place. He’s big, like you were, Solas. Elegant and bright, trapped out there in the nothing parts of the universe. If I didn’t, somebody else would have.”

“I know how it works,” he said.

“You were right about the Backwater,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

He sighed. He took a hit, then he held it out to her one last time. She hesitated. Mythal did not do many drugs, not anymore. She did not like to lose control.

“It is only an offer,” said Solas after a moment, watching her. “The day has ended. I am the only one here.”

She glanced down at the coin, once, then she took the joint from Solas, practiced but plain, and inhaled. She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, it was still just him. He was like a plank across the chest, his hands as big as stars. Young and efficient. He had a bit of bruising around his neck—fingerprints from the brute. He would not complain about it though. Solas never complained, but when she saw him, and he looked like this, like the boy he was on the day they first met, only bigger now, and sadder, and bruised, she was overcome with guilt and frustration, and she wanted to die.

She handed him the coin.

“What is this?” he said, shifting in his chair.

“It is from my father,” she said, holding the joint between two fingers. Solas slid her the ashtray. She ashed, smoked, waited, debonair. “An old token from his youth. He’s not doing well. These past couple of days. There has been a decline.” She looked away.

Solas held the coin in his fingers. “I could tell there was something,” he said. “That it wasn’t just Elgar’nan. How bad is it.”

“My mother is beside herself,” said Mythal, smoking and looking out the window. The train yard down there was more like a cemetery now. “His mind…it’s like moths inside. I’d give it a week, maybe two. She has tasked me with examining his will. She, of course, cannot bear to do it herself, nor will she leave it to the arbiters, so the honor is mine.”

“I can examine your father’s will,” said Solas, setting the coin on the windowsill. “I have done that sort of thing before.”

“I couldn’t ask you to do that, Solas,” she said.

“I am offering.”

She passed him the joint. "We shall see." She fanned the white smoke out of the air between them. She glanced around the room, softening all of a sudden.

"What is it?" said Solas.

"The candles," she said. "They're very pretty tonight. Is it pink, or gold?”

Solas took one long, final drag, dipped the joint. He looked at her through a kind of paradisiacal haze in which everything bad was a mystery. “It’s a bit of both,” he said. “I’m not sure.”

“Well, I like them.”

He got up from his chair.

“Are you leaving?” she said, watching him.

“No,” he said.

“You should,” she said. “You should go, Solas. I know this town is rat-infested, but there has to be something you’d rather be doing right now.”

“I thought about going back upstairs to the garden,” he said, stopping at the brass cart over by the mantle—stacked with booze and crystal cups and strange silver instruments for stirring and stabbing. “But she’s probably asleep by now.”

“Probably,” said Mythal.

“I’m not tired,” he said, uncorking the whiskey.

“Me neither,” she said. “Have you heard from Ghil?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“I hear she’s doing well,” said Mythal, holding her hands out in front of her. Mythal was small, bird-boned, and despite her prowess with the sword, she still often found herself taken with the fantasy that she was big and tall, and that she did not need the rites of magic or money or men to properly defend herself. Of course, Mythal knew better than anyone the great chasm between what is desired and what comes to pass. “I know she used to make it easier for you, at the end of the day. For a while at least.”

“That is true,” said Solas, pouring a bit of branch water into his whiskey. It was an expensive habit, one of many he’d picked up over the years.

“Once I saw you two,” said Mythal. “Before we ever met. Just sitting down there, on those very train cars. I was in this very spot, looking out this very window.”

“What were we doing?” he said.

“You were smoking,” she said, “and talking. Just like we are. It was nothing unusual. I was jealous.”

“Jealous?”

“Of your freedom.” She examined the rings on her fingers. Heavy, gold rings. “Imagine the irony. Sometimes I would like to crawl out this window and fall a very long distance.”

“You’re being dramatic,” said Solas.

“I know.” She was dreamy.

He poured her a glass of something with bubbles. He brought it to her and sat back down in the chair. “Tell me more about Elgar’nan,” he said. “I understand his aggression, but I have never dealt with him before in the parlor. What can we expect, realistically?”

“He’s rough,” she said. “He’ll keep pressing.”

“Why?”

"The Backwater is a link to the sea,” she said. “He wants ships.”

“He wants Andruil.”

“I detest that woman,” said Mythal. “And I know you do as well, but for the time being, she and Ghilan’nain are our allies. Another reason you were right about the Backwater.”

“You say he’s rough,” said Solas, sipping his whiskey and water. “Elgar’nan. That is an unusual choice of words.”

She took a clean drink from her tall glass. “He is a violent man, in and out of the parlor, Solas. He’s been quiet these past few years, but now he seems to sense a threat. He does not take no for an answer. Ally or not, we should prepare for some sort of more formal retaliation.”

Solas swallowed the remainder of his whiskey and set the heavy glass down on the table. All around them, the cold, pink candles winked. “Tell me something,” he said, curious.

“Yes.”

“You say you were supposed to marry him. But I sense a history. Between you. Something actualized.”

“Excuse me?” she said.

“Tell me," he said.

“Why?”

“Because we're friends. And because I'd like to know exactly what we're dealing with here, and that includes your past relationships with men who try to garrote me in the parlor.”

“You must know everything,” she said, sighing, staring down into her wine, the bubbles rising pleasantly to the surface. “Always with you, Solas. It was nothing. We were barely your age. It was before…all of this came to a head.” She drank, deeply. She picked up her father’s coin from the windowsill and pocketed it once more. “He was one of many. Back when I was but a joke and a conquest.”

“A joke and a conquest?"

“Indeed,” she said, “I assure you, I was. And when you grow up in a castle in Arlathan like I did, there is always plenty of excess to be had. Especially for a girl like me. I paid my dues.”

“You are not a joke and a conquest,” he said. "Be reasonable."

“I am being reasonable, Solas. It’s the truth.”

Solas leaned forward in his chair then, a wide presence over the table. He seemed troubled by this. He reached, gently, to tilt her chin up so he could get a better look at her face. How she was sad and all full of sharp angles. Still scribbly-eyed, though she hid it well. He’d never touched her like this before. She let him at first, but then, she flinched.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“I’m just looking,” he said. He withdrew his hand. “I apologize.”

“It’s all right,” she said, setting her glass on the table. She touched the hollow of her cheek, looked away.

"What's the matter?"

“Perhaps I should go," she said. "You can stay here. I’ll go elsewhere. I’ll go to the aviary.”

“The aviary?” he said. “No. Don’t go.”

She looked at him, right at the vallaslin. She could feel it, humming off his forehead. Pale and blue and inevitable. There was more of it, too. Like chains, everywhere. How it etched his body and held him, tightly, to her. She’d had to do it, in places she could not see. The stronger he got, the more valuable he became. She wouldn’t lose him to another. But she had never once used it. Had never touched it. Had never considered it. Precisely like his mother’s, Solas’s vallaslin was created for protection and nothing more. It was never for compulsion, or instruction. She did not use it to communicate with him, the way she did with her Sentinel Army, and by now, even if she’d wanted to start, she no longer had the power to do so. He had overcome her in some ways. He just didn’t know it yet.

“Are you sure?” she said.

“We’re just talking,” he said. “It’s just a drink. If you would like to be alone, I’ll go.”

She shook her head, imagining all the ways in which her life could have gone differently. "Don't," she said. "Stay."

He smiled.

After a moment, however, he put his elbows on the table and stared at her. Focus, hard. Sad and made of winter, she was older than him, and she felt it. But she was still young enough to melt a little inside the moment. She had never liked to be touched, and she wondered how they'd gotten this far without it becoming an issue between them. He’d just always paid heed, until that night. She knew it must have been hard for him to understand, and yet because it was in his nature, she also knew that he would try.

“Mythal,” he said eventually.

“Yes?”

“Are you afraid of me?”

She looked at him. “Afraid of you?”

“Yes,” he said. “Afraid of letting me touch you.”

“Solas—”

“It's all right,” he said, very serious. “You know you cannot compel me. If you could, I’d see the immediate conflict. But that’s not what this is about.”

“I am not afraid of you, Solas,” she said.

“The fear is coming off of you like wild birds in your hair. You do not have to give me an answer. I am just asking.”

She took a very long drink, hit the bottom of the glass. Her eyes felt like mirrors. Her brown hair was a mess around her cheeks. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Do not apologize.”

“It's just a reflex,” she said. “It's not you. I can't explain.”

“That's all right,” he said. “I just—for what it's worth, you do not have to be afraid of me, Mythal. Do you understand?"

She nodded. "Yes."

"For any reason. Others, perhaps. But not you. Never you.”

"You are good to me," she said.

“I try.” He smiled. He always seemed to know what to say. He could not help himself. “Would you like me to make you a butterfly?” he said. "Just one."

She laughed at this, looked down. She leaned into the table with her hands in her lap, but then, she suddenly became irritated for some reason. So he read her mind, because it had always been his job to read her mind, and he pushed that table with his foot so it was out of the way. She shook her head then. She thought she might cry. “You’ve always been the kinder one in our arrangement, Solas,” she said. “No matter what people say.”

“That is a matter for debate."

“All the men who’ve touched me have been brute about it,” she went on, crossing her arms over her chest. "I don't know why."

This seemed to sadden him a little, but he did not seem surprised. The world was full of vultures, and they both knew that. But she could sense him watching as she stared at his lovely candles on the wall. He moved his chair to be closer to her. She could hear the legs scraping on the stone.

"I’ve never been with a man who was gentle," she went on. "Or who cared about what I wanted.”

He slid his hand into hers. Big, rough. She did not flinch this time. It was just Solas, she reminded herself. Whatever had happened, whatever the stakes, he was the only one who ever really knew her at all. And yet, the thing he said next came as a complete surprise.

“Would you like to be?”

She looked at him. Full of need all of a sudden. Somehow, the possibility had not occurred to her until that very moment. That they would become more. So much time had gone by, leaving nothing to chance, she thought. And yet, here they were, right back where this whole thing began. Right? She studied his eyes, the little gray lights of dreaming.

She said yes.

And as soon as she did, he put the hair behind her ear. Just like that. She’d seen him do this a thousand times, with easy girls from the city. The kind who wanted to squirm around beneath him in boring places, just for the night, to be close to his power, dispensed with, and nothing more. But he was not a man of conquest, and unlike the men she’d known in the decade prior, Solas did not feel the need to prove himself to anyone. It didn’t matter how young or how old he was. As he kissed her, she knew that this would always be true. She had always loved him, for many different reasons, and that night, some part of her got lost inside him. Leaving a jagged edge where her starved heart broke. But she didn't care. She just didn't care.

 _The candles_ , she thought as they went to the bed. She would always remember the candles as well.

 

“Is this your dream or mine?” she said. They were standing at the foot of her bone tower, looking up. The sky was full of huge, white birds. He had his hands in his pockets.

“Yours,” he said, genuinely perplexed. “I don’t know how I got here.”

“You came here,” she said. “Your head is hurt, but you’ll be okay. You are a tough specimen, Fen’Harel.”

“But why am I going backward?” he said, looking down at her. "I don't get it."

Mythal turned to him. He was a beautiful man, grown, deconstructed, then fully formed again. She touched his face. He smiled. He was different since she’d last seen him in the Crossroads. Something had changed, for the better. “The mockingbird will sing, Fen’Harel. You cannot stop it. All will reveal itself in time.”

“You never used to call me that,” he said. “Fen’Harel. Not in private. But you do now. Why?”

“Habit," she said. "It's how I've come to think of you, because Solas does not belong to me anymore. Fen’Harel always will. I am a revisionist.”

He put the hair behind her ear. Brown and straight, like winter plants. “You certainly are not a revisionist. You never have been.”

“Well,” she said. “Then I’d like to be.”

Solas glanced back up to the top of the tower. From here, it almost looked like a lighthouse. Somewhere far away in the distance, he heard the ships begin to sing. “I’ve been here dozens of times,” he said, shaking his head. “I can’t stop. But someone is waiting for me in the other direction. I can feel her, I just can’t remember.”

“What does she feel like?” said Mythal. “The one.”

“She is warm,” he said. “And very tall.”

“Like you,” said Mythal.

“A little like me.”

“I think I can do it,” she said, stretching her arms over her head and closing her eyes. “Finally. There are enough of you. Just for a little while. Then maybe you can break from this loop.”

“You’ll be a leaf in decay,” he said.

“I know.”

“I have a very bad feeling, Mythal.” The wind picked up. It was cold in the middle of the end. The nowhere plants were blooming in large, dark quantities from the ceiling, bringing their bounty of night. Then, the moon came out into the sky like a great big window. “She is stronger than I thought possible. I should have told her everything.” He felt through his pockets. He was looking for something. “I should have told her.”

He sighed, glancing down. But the space beside him was empty. “Mythal?” he said. He looked around. There were not even footprints to be had in the snow or birds plucking along in her path. She was just gone. He took a walk and sat down at the edge of a long lost pier from his childhood. He put his feet in the water as the snow began to fall. “Where are you?” he said.

 

“Once, he feigned support for a wild merchant who was asking too much of the refugees in Lothering,” said Morrigan. “He pissed off a sister, and then, once she was gone, he killed that merchant for his hubris. He was a brash man in his prime. It could be unsettling, though I saw the soft of his heart. There were moments, of course. And he saw mine as well. His parents had both died in a single act of traitorous violence and he was pitched full force into the life of of an orphan, complete with both reluctant heroics and ample, daily risk. In the end, he was twenty-three years old and searching, desperately, for meaning. I suppose that, for a little while, I provided that for him.”

Sene and Morrigan were out in the courtyard, making their way through the clusters of people and the merchant carts. It was a colorful evening, with lanterns hanging from steel wires overhead. The healers had all agreed about Solas—that he was all right, that he only needed to wake up. They encouraged Sene to stay by his side and do familiar things. Like read and hold his hand, as the sound of her voice and the warmth of her skin could help draw him out of wherever he was hiding in the Fade. Meanwhile, Dorian thought that, probably, Solas would not emerge until whatever ailed him was full-healed. _Solas_ _understands how rest regenerates the human body,_ he said to Sene. _He will resurface when he is ready._ Per this, and widespread insistence that everything would be all right, Sene decided to take a break, with Morrigan, and somehow, they had gotten on the subject of Kieran’s father, Matthew Cousland—prodigal son of Highever, Hero of Ferelden, and the Gray Warden who, just ten years back, had sacrificed his life to saved the world.

“How old were you?” said Sene. She stopped at one of the merchant carts to put her hand on a large pumpkin.

“I was twenty-two,” said Morrigan. “My life, up until that point, had been a complicated task of balancing my mother’s treacherous demands with my desires to…experience the world without her.”

"The world is a different place than I thought it would be,” said Sene, thinking.

Then, a merchant approached. She was an Orlesian woman with a high-collared dress and a wide-brimmed hat trimmed in bronze. “Thirty silver for the pumpkin, My Lady," said the merchant. "But only fifteen for you."

Sene gave her a smile.

“You would charge your savior for a vegetable in the place of her near-death?” said Morrigan, tightening the scarf around her throat. “I supposed you’d charge a suffering sister for her elfroot as well, as long as it filled your purse?”

“It’s all right,” said Sene.

But the merchant blushed. You could see the red in her half-hidden cheeks. “I apologize, Lady Morrigan.”

“I am not the one to whom you should apologize," she said.

Sene reached into her pocket, withdrew a small handful of silver. She counted it out. “Fifteen. Here you are. I think Sera would like this pumpkin. We’ll bake it into a pie.”

But the merchant woman refused her coin. “I was mistaken, Your Worship,” she said. “For you, the pumpkin is free of cost. And might I offer my sincerest condolences on your warrior. I hear that he is injured. I do wish him the speediest of recoveries.” She bowed her head.

“Oh,” said Sene. She had not realized the news would travel so quickly. “Thank you.” She dropped the coin into a silvery pile on the merchant’s cart. “Do what you will with this. I’ll send someone around to pick up the pumpkin in an hour.”

“Thank you, My Lady,” said the merchant. She bowed repeatedly. Sene asked her not to do that. She put her hand on the merchant’s shoulder in an act of solidarity, and then she and Morrigan moved on to the next.

“You say he was brash,” Sene said eventually as they walked. “Your Matthew.”

A group of children rushed by. One of them was holding a small bell and rang it repeatedly, reminding Sene of Crestwood. The other was holding a red balloon and let it go into the air.

“He was a rich boy with a bandit’s heart,” said Morrigan. “He did not care for small talk. He was disarming, to say the least, a little like your Solas. Who he chose to comfort and who he chose to threaten could seem unpredictable to most. He’d cut down a priest to save a whore. Alistair, of course, found this distasteful. Matthew threatened his faithful Chantry charm. I, however, found it intriguing. One might think a veritable _witch of the wilds_ has lived a life full of tales worth telling, but in reality, Sene, I was just like you: twenty-two years old, a book smart backwater girl with very little knowledge of the world outside my own narrow existence. I mean no offense, of course, Inquisitor, only that I understand what it is to be drawn to a man whose darkness makes you reexamine your own.”

“Darkness?” said Sene. She stopped to look at Morrigan. Morrigan wore high-heeled boots that day, which put the two of them almost eye-to-eye. “What do you mean?”

There was a visitor then. A woman emerged from the crowd. She was holding a basket of produce and asked where she might find the kitchens.

“Inside,” said Sene. “I can show you, if you like.”

“No, that is quite all right,” said the woman. “I will find my own way.”

“Are you a servant?” said Sene.

The woman smiled. She was pretty and sort of fanciful. Frail, like she could crumble into a pile of nothing at any moment. She had brown hair and hollow, tired eyes. She seemed to get lost in Sene. But Sene was used to this. “Yes,” she said. “I am a servant. Thank you, Inquisitor.” She stared for a moment more. Then she turned to go.

But Morrigan grabbed the woman by the arm. “Wait,” she said.

"What's the matter?" said Sene.

"Can it be?” said Morrigan.

“Can what be?" said the woman.

But Morrigan was fixated. Hard lines drawn between their feline eyes. “I do not understand."

The woman did not struggle. She seemed equally rapt in Morrigan, and there was something unearthly going on between them. "Please unhand me," she said.

“What is this?” said Sene. "Morrigan?"

“I am just a servant,” said the woman. “I do not wish to interfere.”

“Yes you do,” said Morrigan, the veins popping out of her neck like iron cables. “And you are certainly no servant. _What are you doing here, Mythal?_ ”

Like a knife twisting in her guts.

"Mythal?" Sene took one step backward. Her instinct at a time like this was to reach for her weapon, but she carried nothing that day. Meanwhile everything in the courtyard went on as usual, an evening parade of happiness and joyous exchange.

"I don't understand," said Sene.

“It is Solas,” said Morrigan, she looked at Sene, then she looked at the servant woman. “It is him, is it not? You are here for him.”

“Solas?” said Sene.

"Please trust me, Well-drinker," said the woman to Morrigan. “He is trapped in a loop of sorts. I crawled through to feel things. And to try and pull him out from the other side. Please do not fear me.”

"You crawled through?” said Sene. “Crawled through what?"

She looked at Sene, a pleading in her massive, mud-colored eyes. “The Veil."

“Sene, be very cautious,” said Morrigan, still holding the woman’s arm, and she was leering over her with her narrowed yellow eyes. "I am not sure yet what to make of this."

"Hold on,” said Sene. Breathing, fast. Everything was so fucking fast, even for her. “I'm confused. I thought we met Mythal in Crestwood. I thought your _mother_ was Mythal.”

But Morrigan just shook her head, a look of horror in her face. “My mother is but a vessel to the goddess. She holds just one piece in her blood.”

“How many pieces are there?" said Sene.

"I am not a goddess," said Mythal. "And there are many pieces, but most of them have died."

"They've died?" said Sene.

A man bumped into her from behind—Orlesian, masked. She almost put him into the ground by reflex alone.

“I am so sorry, Your Worship,” said the man, bowing, holding out his hands.

She shook her head, grasping for her bearings. “It’s all right,” she said, once she realized. “On with you.”

He obliged. The wind picked up.

Morrigan dropped Sene's hand. “You've come here dressed as a servant,” she said to the woman in the courtyard. "Why?"

“I have no power here,” said the woman, gazing at Morrigan. Some light in her eyes. “But I knew you would recognize me.”

“Do you plan to take him?” said Morrigan, ignoring the sentiment. “Solas? What do you plan to do?”

“No,” said the woman. “No, no.”

An Inquisition soldier passed then, one of many in the courtyard. There was a moment in which everything was unclear, in which the world felt more like a swirl of bright colors than a place of order and code. Sene, finally giving in to her baser instincts, disarmed that soldier, hard and fast, taking the knife from his belt and dispensing him to a merchant's cart nearby. The noise was loud. She wrenched the frail woman around and held that knife to her throat. The basket dropped from the woman's hands and tipped over, a perfect collection of beautiful, golden apples and tomatoes, all spilling at their feet like broken promises. The soldier stumbled, and held his head in confusion. He hadn't known what hit him. A hush fell over the crowd.

Morrigan straightened up after this. She looked around. “There is nothing to see here,” she said, loudly. “Back to your wilding. All of you.”

She had a mean, important look about her, and so, they listened. The noise, the rush of appearances resumed shortly, as Morrigan took that rattled soldier by the arm and told him to fetch Commander Cullen as soon as humanly possible. Then, she put her hand on Sene’s shoulder. “Sene,” she said. “Try to be calm. Please."

"Be calm?" said Sene.

"This woman has no power. I can sense her weakness.”

“You say this is Mythal,” said Sene. She was delirious. She felt freezing cold. “I have to believe what you say. But I do not trust Mythal, Morrigan. I do not trust the woman I met in Crestwood.”

“I am not Flemeth,” said the woman, choking against the knife. “She is not me. Her will is not mine.”

“Why were you talking about Solas?” said Sene. “Why are you here for him? Why? What is it with him and you and Flemeth? _What is it?_ ”

"Please let me go,” she said. "I already told you. Please—"

“Tell me again.”

“Fen’Harel has trapped himself,” said Mythal, gripping hard to Sene’s freckled arm. But she was so small, so powerless in comparison. Fighting only made things worse. “If I did not leave him, he might have got lost forever. Don't you see? With him and Flemeth, her daughter the Well-drinker, and now Sorrow in the wind, I have enough anchors, for the first time in millennia. I found a way through.”

“Fen’Harel?” said Sene. She loosened her grip, swung the woman around so she could see her face, holding her hard by the shoulder. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Mythal looked as if she’d seen a ghost. She was terrified. Morrigan had her face in her hands and was shaking her head back and forth. “Of course,” she was saying, over and over and over again as if she’d lost her mind. The people whooshed all around them, like birds caught in a maelstrom. The Commander was approaching, his hand on his sword, the moon getting big, the air thickening to the sounds of the marching of dutiful men through the courtyard. “Of course. Of course," said Morrigan.

Of course.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Readers,
> 
> Thank you for sticking with me this far, and for your patience and devotion as this story expands. I find myself increasingly sustained by your comments, kudos, and even just your bright, simmering love from a distance. And know that, when it comes to Sene and Solas and the story of their love, I am still going strong, and I plan to see this thing through to the very end. I will not let you down. 
> 
> Also, a couple reminders: My playlist for The Dead Season is currently on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/user/galadrieljones/playlist/0n9HPvx4lk5dEDXKaPwEqb). Feel free to subscribe. Music is a huge part of my writing process, so I thought I'd let you in on how that works. You can find some explanation for these songs on [tumblr](http://galadrieljones.tumblr.com/post/155226536496/the-dead-season-an-ongoing-playist-its-the-end). And you can find me there as well, plus a bunch more of my writing, if you're so inclined. Thank you again! <3 
> 
> G


	38. Assassins

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ROMEO.   Courage, man. The hurt cannot be much.  
> MERCUTIO.   No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church  
>      door, but 'tis enough. 'Twill serve. ( _Romeo and Juliet_ 3.1.91-93)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _cw: violence, mention of blood, mild obsessive compulsive behavior_

“What the fuck are you talking about?” said Sene. She dropped the knife. It made a loud noise inside her head like an anvil that had fallen from a very tall building. She looked at Morrigan. “What is she talking about?”

Morrigan picked up her face from her hands. “I—I’m not sure.”

Mythal’s hands were shaking now as she fussed with her skirt. The dress was patchwork, as if she’d made it herself, and yet, somehow, beautiful. The pieces were perfect and rigid and the more Sene stared, the harder the fabrics and the colors became to differentiate from one another. It was just—gold. The whole thing, gold. “I should not have said that,” she said. “It was a mistake.”

“Which part was the mistake?” said Sene. She took Mythal hard by the arm _._ “Which part?”

Mythal closed her eyes. “What have I done? What have I done?”

Sene felt a hand on her shoulder then. It belonged to a man. She knew it didn’t belong to Solas. It was not possessive enough. It was not big enough. Solas was unconscious in a bed locked high up in a tower, and she knew his hands better than she knew her own. That hand was Cullen’s.

“Cullen,” she said to him. “Not now.”

“I haven’t done anything yet.”

“Commander,” said Morrigan, quietly. “I think it would be best if we went inside now. All of us.”

“I can see that,” said Cullen. He lowered his voice. "Sene. Are you all right?"

She looked at him, then she looked at Morrigan, and then she looked at Mythal. She wiped off her mouth on the back of her hand. She felt like she was drooling. She let go of Mythal, and she turned around and thought about running good and long, and then she ended up tugging her hair so hard the braids came loose and her scalp hurt. But then, she slammed into someone. Hard. A tall body, thin but still a presence. She thought it must be another elf, and when she looked up, she saw a man wearing a cowl of the likes she’d never seen. He had one blue eye and one brown eye with a tangled-up scar going through the middle. He was holding an axe, had it resting on his shoulder like some kind of lumberjack.

“Do I know you?” she said.

Then, she heard Mythal’s voice. “That is not your friend.”

He picked up his axe. He took a swing.

People screamed. There was a lot of movement in the courtyard, shuffling, the stampede. Everybody seemed to see what was going on except for Sene. But axes were slow and Sene had, in her short, fucked-up lifespan so far, ducked much crazier shit than an axe. She found herself almost face-first in the concrete, not a scratch on her when she looked up, and then she saw Cullen like a blunt object, striking the cowled axe man square in the face with the butt of his sword. The noise it made was unpleasant, and the man’s face sort of exploded, and then he went to his knees and closed his eyes. He fell into unconsciousness, slowly, like a leaf falling from a tree.

Sene got up. Everything stopped after that. Everything. The people, the screaming, the sun, the moon, the stars. Mankind was a thing of the distant past. The courtyard was an evening dream. She saw Mythal, standing there like some deranged doll in the moonlight. She’d gotten in the way, and she had blood from the man’s nose and teeth speckling her face and the front of her dress.

Mythal looked right at her. She was saying something again, but Sene couldn't make out the words.

"What?" said Sene.

"There's somebody behind you," said Mythal.

"I can't hear you," said Sene.

"Please see."

Then, a strange woman's voice, and a knife at Sene's throat. This, she heard: "To your love, Inquisitor."

Sene threw her head back, made contact with a woman's face. It had been on instinct alone. "Fuck you," she said. She turned around. She saw another cowled figure, this one good and alive and holding fast to her bloody nose, and she wasn't done for, not by a long shot, but before she could come at Sene with the knife in her hand, somebody else came and broke that woman's neck from behind. The noise was loud. The knife fell. So did the woman. She was dead. So much violence.

Leliana stood there, cavalier, taking off her gloves.

"Leliana?" said Sene. "What the fuck is going on?"

“This place is trying to kill you,” she said, nudging the dead woman with her boot. "Though it's doing a terrible job in execution, if you ask me." 

"What?"

"In case you haven't noticed, Inquisitor, there are assassins in the castle." She surveyed the scattered grounds, her agents already knee-deep in the courtyard, clearing the merchants and stripping it to its studs. "They've killed two of your cooks already."

"My cooks?" said Sene.

Leliana nodded while Cullen took immediate action. He gagged and bound the unconscious axe man in the dirt, and then he directed two of his stronger men to haul ass and drag the bastard away. "Might I suggest we get inside," said Leliana to Sene, "before the night takes hold completely, and the moonlight strikes us blind."

 

They sealed themselves downstairs in the brig while the castle was being gutted from the inside out—Cullen, Leliana, Sene, Morrigan, the axe man, and the stranger few knew as Mythal. There had been soldiers and servants everywhere, flinging around like ghosts, and on their way downstairs, Sene had been reminded of the Winter Palace in the gardens when it seemed like everyone was bleeding and there were people fighting in secret and killing each other in the space of such elegant scenery. How many men did she kill that night, getting their blood on the velvet drapes? She could not be sure.

She begged to leave, but Cullen would not let her. On one occasion, he'd had to use his size to physically bar her from the door. He was in and then out and then in and then out. She swore at him. It made things feel confusing and chaotic, and after a while, she just stood angrily with Morrigan, feeling bovine and dysfunctional, stupid animals trapped in an underground cave, stupidly worried that everyone in the castle was dead or dying but them.  _To your love, Inquisitor._ She wondered at some point if Solas was already dead but instead of bursting into tears she just held it all inside and convinced herself that as long as she did not say it out loud, it could never come true. She couldn't understand why all of this was happening at once. She wanted a break. She wanted to go home.

Soon, however, Cullen came with his report.

“Dorian, Iron Bull, and Sera are with Solas,” he said with conviction, using a blue handkerchief to polish the hilt of his sword. “And so are ten of my best men. I assure you, they are safe.”

"What about Kieran?" said Sene.

Cullen looked at Morrigan who stood very straight in a dark corner with her arms held tightly to her body. “Kieran is there as well.”

Morrigan had to steady herself against the wall.

"Fuck, Cullen," said Sene. "Is anyone else dead?"

"Not that we know of."

"Not that you know of?"

"I'm working on it."

She screamed.

Leliana had tied the broken-faced axe man to a chair in one of the cells. She had emptied his pockets, and now she stood by with a great big black leather folder and simply stared at him, rapt. Like she was reading his mind, or working through some huge, complicated equation in her head. The brig in Suledin Keep was big. The servants kept it very clean and lit with a great many white candles. There were perhaps twenty cells in all, and each of them was empty. The Emprise du Lion was far too freezing and the terrain was not conducive to banditry. Other than the dragon attacks, with Imshael gone, this was supposed to be a safe place.

Mythal had been standing by herself in one of the cells at the end of the long hallway, looking up into the high window. It was like a square of moonlight up there, and she was scratching at some dry patch on her arm with the blood still on her dress and her face. Nobody paid attention to her. When asked, Morrigan claimed she was another apostate, seeking refuge with the Inquisition. With Sene’s approval and very little convincing, Cullen simply nodded his head. Leliana was more suspicious, but Mythal had agreed to do whatever she asked, and for the time being, with two dead cooks on her hands and a castle potentially full of assassins, this was good enough.

At some point, Sene went and stood with Mythal in the cell. Mythal had scratched her arm raw.

“Stop,” said Sene.

Mythal turned around. She was surprised to see that Sene had come. She looked down at her arm. It was all red and flaky. She pulled down her sleeve. “The feelings,” she said to Sene, looking up with plum pits for eyes. “They’re like drugs. I can’t stop.”

“You're hurting yourself."

“I'm sorry," said Mythal.

Then, once again, Cullen was there.

Sene turned to look at him. Tired, big man in the dripping, dark brig. “What is it?" she said.

“I am sorry to disturb," he said. "But you ran off before I could explain what's going on."

"What else is there to explain?"

“We are clearing the castle," he said, leaning into the bars. "You'll need to stay down here until we can be sure there is no one hiding in the wings, or in the surrounding paths. We’ll then be leaving the Emprise du Lion as soon as possible and heading back to Skyhold."

"Skyhold?" said Sene. "What about Solas? What about the dragon?"

“You were once transported from the Emprise du Lion all the way back to Skyhold in far graver condition than Solas," he said, very stern. "And in terms of the dragon, you’ve done good work here, but it is just too dangerous. We need to lie low until we can figure out who it is that’s behind all of this. When Solas is awake and rehabilitated, you can come back and finish what you started.”

Sene turned to the wall. She pushed off of it like she was trying to bring the whole thing down.  _Rehabilitated._ She looked at her boots. They were very dirty. “How long will it take to clear the castle?”

“I’m not sure,” said Cullen. “Two assassins is just as likely to be five, and five is just as likely to be ten.” He looked at Mythal then who was back to staring up at that window. She was like a bird in mourning. He gave Sene a concerned look.

"Everything is fine," she said.

He nodded at this, resigning. "I shall keep you posted, Inquisitor," he said. He hung his head and walked away.

Once he was gone, Sene dragged two chairs into that cell and sat, waiting. She picked at her nails and braided the hair off her face, trying to find a way to break the moment into little pieces so that she could sift through it somehow. But her anger, it was blinding. Meanwhile, Mythal stood there like a picture, her pretty face in the cut of the moonlight. She waited a long time to speak. At some point, she saw Sene sitting with her head hanging between her knees, trying to breathe, and she was so reminded of Solas, she couldn't take it anymore.

“Your Commander is in love with you,” she said, finally. “Or at least with the idea of you. You should forgive him."

“He is not in love with me,” said Sene.

“I fear I have brought misfortune to this place,” said Mythal, looking at the window. "Is it true?"

“I don’t think so,” said Sene, scuffing her boot across the floor. “There have been dozens of threats over the past few months. It was only a matter of time before something like this actually happened. I should not be so surprised.”

“You are terribly brave,” said Mythal. “Especially for how young you are. If it were me at the age of twenty, I’d have already run for the hills.”

“Yeah, well," said Sene. "I've tried that one before. It didn’t work.”

“I remember that night,” said Mythal, looking up at the window. “When Solas disappointed you, and Sorrow was there to share his drugs.”

Sene straightened up in her chair. The word, it was like a pang. _Sorrow._ “Abelas?" she said.

"Yes."

"You saw us?"

“Where I live in the Fade,” said Mythal, “there is a window. I can usually see all the stories of the world from there. Some of them filter on to my various vessels, like Flemeth, so I apologize if she made you feel uncomfortable back in Crestwood. She has a lot of her own power, and she can tend to be very mean. But Sorrow—I lost track of Sorrow after that night. I can feel him, but I just can’t see him anymore. I think he has found a way to shut me out. Do you know how he is doing?”

“No,” said Sene.

“He has always been a sweet boy,” said Mythal, shaking her head. “I feel enormous regret. I would like to take it all back, Sene.”

“Mythal,” said Sene, very serious. “That night in Crestwood, if you were watching, then you know Abelas told me how he knew Solas. He was vague about it, but I know now that Solas is old like you, and I can see that you know them both. I'm not stupid. I need you to tell me what you meant when you called him _Fen’harel_.”

“It is not my place to tell you that,” she said.

"Then whose place is it?” said Sene. “I'm trapped down here. We're both trapped down here in an empty jail while Solas is lying unconscious on the other side of the castle. Somebody is trying to kill me, and that means they're trying to kill him, too. You are the one who said it, Mythal. So whether it was a mistake or not, what am I supposed to think?”

Mythal turned around, her face half-lit by the window. “Solas is only trying to protect you with his secrets," she said. "Dalish girl. Whip and red apple. Of course I know him. But from what I can see, up until now, you’ve preferred your ignorance.”

“What?” said Sene.

“You are like Solas in many ways,” said Mythal. She came and sat down in the chair across from Sene, her hands tucked into her lap. "A tough specimen. Fast, bright. Always thirsty. Big and strong. But you are also not like him in many ways. You, you are the girl who would like to keep your heart light. But Solas is the man who must carry everything. You wonder why he possesses so little in the way of material goods? That is because all that Solas owns, he keeps inside. He has consumed more of you than you realize, Sene. That is what Solas does. He consumes things. He must know everything. He must _own_ everything. Life is easier for Solas when he is in control.”

“I know that,” said Sene. “I have experienced that.”

“I’m sure you have,” said Mythal. “For you, though, demons are easier when they stay buried, aren’t they? Or perhaps when you can outrun them. I understand this. When we can keep them tucked softly in their beds, and as long as they are quiet, and as long as they are behind us, or sealed away, then they cannot touch us. They cannot hurt us. Tell me, how long did it take you to ask him for the truth?”

“What do you mean?” said Sene. “What truth?”

“About his life. Who he was before he met you.”

Sene faltered. “I—a long time,” she said. “I’m not sure.”

Mythal smiled. “Did you ever really ask him, Sene?”

She thought about it. About the Temple, about Skyhold. About that morning in Val Royeaux when she promised not to push him. About Crestwood. About the Fade. “I don’t know,” she said.

“You are a good woman,” said Mythal. “One of exactly two in all existence who could ever hope to change his mind about anything. The other was, of course, his mother. She is dead now. Like her, you give him so much space. So much freedom? To grow and to heal. To be a man. You demand nothing of him but love. And yet, he needs you. How is it possible that you have no more claim over him than you did in the very beginning?”

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t mean that literally,” said Mythal, tapping her knuckles as if she were taking count. “Because literally, he is yours. He walks in your alleys and he loves you alone. He has made his choice. He came to me not long ago, just to tell me this.” She began to pick at her fingernails. She shook her head, growing impatient. “Because why would he go back to a place where his mother is dead and there is nobody left to protect him from himself? He is cooked. He is done. He would marry you tonight if given the chance. He would invent an entire world with his love for you alone. Some might say he already has. Did you know that his father once built me a dollhouse?”

“No, I didn’t,” said Sene.

Mythal smiled. “It was a beautiful dollhouse," she said. "It had yellow shutters and a pink door. I will never forget it."

“What do you mean that Solas came to you?" said Sene. "When did he come to you?"

“Solas loves you,” said Mythal, ignoring her question. “It's crazy, how time goes by. But you—you feel differently, don’ t you, Sene? Of course you love him. But when you look at him lately, you deny him. You don't want the truth. You feel distance.”

“That's not true," said Sene.

“You can’t lie to me,” said Mythal. “And why would you lie anyway? I am a stranger to you."

“You are not a stranger,” said Sene. “I was raised in your worship. There are paintings of you in my clan’s cellar.”

“That is not what I want,” said Mythal. “That is not who I am.”

“You called him the Dread Wolf,” said Sene, dispensing with the pleasantries. “I need to know why.”

But with this, Mythal shook her head. “No,” she said, quickly. “No. I did not call him that.”

“What? Yes, you did.”

“I would never call him that,” said Mythal. “I called him _Fen'Harel._ There is a difference.” She seemed to go into some sort of fugue state after this, like a mental paralysis that she could not escape. Everything about her got very serious and very dark. She blinked in time with the candles on the walls and though she claimed to have no power, she still seemed to glow with an aura of deep, deep brass, and it was like storm clouds in there, but this could have just been an illusion. The cell was dark. The moon was a traveling entity.

“What is the difference?” said Sene. "Tell me."

“There never was any Dread Wolf,” said Mythal. She stared down into her hands, opening them and closing them into tiny little fists. “There was only Solas. _The Wolf, Fen’Harel_ —those were just nicknames given to him by his opponents in the boxing ring when he was a teenager, in Arlathan.”

“The Wolf?” said Sene, shaking her head. “He told me about that. I didn’t realize what that meant.”

“Of course you didn’t realize,” said Mythal. “Why would you? After he lost his innocence, _Fen’Harel_ became the alias he used on his enemies, enemies whose crimes eventually came at such cost, that he imprisoned them behind a Veil of his own creation, and that, in turn, destroyed the world as we knew it. The name _Fen’Harel_ was sullied by the people he left behind in ruins, those who did not understand. They thought it was about them. He’s since been cast as your villain, your trickster god, innocently of course, and renamed the Dread Wolf, but you should know that Solas was no no trickster. He was no villain. He was nothing more than a fatherless street urchin when I found him, an ordinary boy who, like his mother, just so happened to have extraordinary power. The two of them came into my service under duress where they were later caught in the middle of a civil war. Everybody was forced to choose a side after that. There was no in between. There were only factions, and more factions, and death. In the end, your people worship the villains. Those who betrayed him, who betrayed us together, and yet, if it weren’t for your _dreaded wolf,_ this world would not exist at all.”

“Betrayed?" said Sene. "Who betrayed him?"

But Mythal began to cry after this. Her tears were molten, white. She was shaking.

“You should know, Sene, that he was not just in my service,” said Mythal, not caring anymore, not thinking. "You should know."

"What was he then?" said Sene. "Please, just tell me."

“He dealt with me," she said. "He protected me. He was my General."

"General?"

"He made butterflies," said Mythal. "Such pretty little magics. He poured my champagne. He lit the candles in the chambers where I slept for ten years."

The candles in the room turned up, then down. White, then soft. Sene thought she'd heard wrong. "Wait," she said. "Ten years?"

“He was unique,” Mythal went on. “He was a rarity. Powerful and young and elegant, made for greatness, and now he lies unconscious in a bed high up in a tower in the middle of a frozen hell in a world where it hurts not to scratch but the scratching hurts. Weak and broken, his proud mind trapped. I helped him free thousands of slaves in our time, Sene. Thousands. In secret, planning his rebellion from the very same fortress he would later give to _you_ as a gift. Some of those slaves I, myself, in all of my brute ignorance, held because I felt I did not have a choice. Of course I did. I was just a coward. A very stupid, very rich woman, afraid of everything. But Solas—he saw some sort of good inside me. He let me think I was worth more than I felt, and if he believed it, then it must have been true. He was feared and he was glorified, and I was, too, but your pantheon is a lie. There were no gods. Only slave drivers in the guise of noble families with too much money and a lot of power, and for it, blood ran like rivers through the streets of Arlathan. Solas was just the one who had the talent to stop them. The talent, and the grief. Because there is no _Dread Wolf,_ Sene. The Dread Wolf does not exist. The man you let into your bed is not the Dread Wolf. You mustn’t think that he is. You must never think that. Do you understand?”

Sene was very quiet. At some point, she had gone away. Mythal’s voice had a high, lilting quality and it had a way of making even the most stark, confusing truths seem both inevitable and somehow necessary. Sene folded over in her chair. She had her head between her knees. For a moment, she was worried she would stop breathing. So she took a great big breath, and then she tugged hard on her hair and in one meat-hearted, walloping moment, she knew it was all true. All of it. Every last word. Even the parts she didn't fully understand.

And yet, she knew there was something else. Some vagueness around the edges, something Mythal was not telling her, and it was messing up the story. Mythal: this tiny woman falling apart in her chair, with her face in her hands, sobbing uncontrollably. She had crawled through the Veil just to be here, just to _pull him out from the other side._ It was a claiming ache and a chaotic despair that Sene could understand, and with this realization, she could feel herself beginning to peel around the edges. It was a very grown-up pain she’d never experienced before. Like being staked. Like being crushed. And in her insignificant twenty-year-old brain, she tried to prepare herself, but she just kept thinking back to the beginning, when it was new, and he had always been older, but not like this, and suddenly, she was not the woman in the room anymore. She was the girl. And she tried to figure her way through this, but there was only one way to know how to do that for Sene, and it was to get the truth, no matter what it cost her.

“Were you lovers?” she said to Mythal. Very quiet. Her hair like springs slowly coming uncoiled. The room seemed to be filling with smoke.

Mythal continued to cry. “Why do you care, fire child? After everything I just told you, that is the part you cling to?"

“Tell me the truth.”

“It doesn't matter," said Mythal. “None of it matters. Not anymore.”

With this, Sene’s throat closed. She knew this meant yes. And in the middle of her chest there was a deep, deep hole.

“It matters,” she said anyway, her small voice hidden away. “Of course it matters. Because I am supposed to be with him, but I'm not with him. I'm here, with you, and you’re sitting here, crying for him. You said the two of you were together for ten years. Partners. Forgive me for fearing that maybe, just maybe, amidst all the rest of his rampant secret-keeping, Solas somehow forgot to mention that, in addition to being Fen’Harel—a secret, by the way, that I can find it in my heart to grasp, shocking as that may seem to him, or to you for that matter—that perhaps, in addition to this, he’s also been hiding the fact that he used to be lovers with _Mythal,_ the goddess whose fucking slave markings I had tattooed on my face for half my life until he offered to remove them in Crestwood, under the pretense of some sort of choice. He said I deserved the truth. He said it was for me. But was it? It could not have possibly been because every time he looked at me, at my face, he saw you, or at the very least thought of you, or some version of you, warped somewhere in his time-addled mind, the last woman he ever loved, who, I’m learning, he might have lived with for _ten years,_ and who was _murdered?_ It could not have possibly been because of that. Could it?”

“I am just a person, Sene,” said Mythal. “I am not a goddess.”

“You are a goddess to me,” said Sene. She got up from her chair so fast, it tipped over, making a loud noise. “Solas knows that. He knows that. Does he know you’re here?”

Mythal was troubled by this. “He sleeps,” she said. “He knows nothing.”

“You said he was trapped in a loop, and you’re here to pull him out. How do you know that he’s trapped in a loop, Mythal?”

“Sene—”

“What kind of loop is it?”

“This was not supposed to happen.” She began shaking her head, chaos. “I was not supposed to do this.”

“Is he in a dream?” said Sene, taking a step backward. “Is he with you?”

Her eyes were squared away and crushed in the moonlight. Mythal understood this. It was pain.

“It is not real,” pleaded Mythal. “It is only the Fade.”

“Those sentences do not apply to Solas,” said Sene. She was starting to cry.

“I left,” said Mythal. “I left so he could find his way back to the surface. To you, Sene. To _you._ ”

But Sene was not listening anymore. She was long gone. She was way high up in the air, looking down. “To me?” she said. She shrugged, full of tearful resignation. “Who am I?”

“What?”

“ _Who am I?_ ” she said.

“You are you,” said Mythal. “Aren’t you? Am I confused again?”

“No,” said Sene, shaking her head. “I am the one who is confused. I need to go.”

“Where?”

“Please don’t talk,” said Sene. “Just don’t talk.”

She left, quickly. There was trauma in her wake. A bruise. It was deep. Mythal could feel it. She didn't know what she had done.

Morrigan came into the room.

"What just happened?" she said. "Mythal, what happened?"

“My life is a clothesline,” said Mythal. She dried her face on her sleeves. Her eyes were manic and she seemed to be made out of forest fires. “Everywhere I turn, there’s dirty laundry. Everything in the open, hung out to dry.”

“You think this is about you?"

“She knows,” said Mythal. “I did not mean it. I swear.”

“What does she know?”

“Everything.”

“What is—?”

Suddenly, then, Mythal stood up and put the hair behind Morrigan’s ear. Like in a trance. Morrigan stumbled backward. “You are not him,” she said, more to herself than anything. “He is gone.”

“You still pine for him,” said Mythal. “Your Matthew?"

Morrigan stiffened up after this, like a tough, beautiful column. She became defensive. “And I suppose you're so different," she said. “At least the man I pine for is dead. I send my love into the void with no hope for its return. It is an act of coping. But the man you pine for is not dead. He just doesn’t want you. He wants someone else. This is not a game, Mythal.”

“I know all the games,” said Mythal. "This is not a game. I assure you, I understand at least that much."

“Then why did you come here?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“You had no place telling her what you did. Is it that you simply cannot help yourself?”

“I said I didn’t mean it,” said Mythal. “I didn’t mean it. I got lost.”

“Ah, yes,” said Morrigan. “Lost. And I suppose jealousy has nothing to do with it.”

“It did,” said Mythal. “Before. Before I knew who she was. But you don’t know what happened, Well-drinker. To me, to him. To us. You hurl the blame, and you tell your bedtime stories. You knit cozy sweaters for your friends, cozied into the lamplight, pretending he and I were just characters hiding out in a book of ancient folklore. But we lived, and I died, and you know nothing of the truth. You nor the Dalish. None of you do."

“Are you talking about your death?” said Morrigan, reading her mind. "The Sentinel Abelas said you were murdered, but the voices only tell vague stories. Nothing is certain.”

“It is all very certain to me." Mythal's face and her dress were still speckled with blood. She had begun to scratch at that spot again, the one on her arm, but her eyes were clear. "It is all very certain," said Mythal. "The way that I died."

 

Meanwhile, as Solas slept and phantom killers roamed the keep, Sene dug a hole in the earth and inside, she placed a box that contained her love for him. Inside of the box were all these things and mementos like hairpins and bells, and she tried to invent the rest but it was like the knots in her hair after going swimming. She couldn't remember it anymore. Instead, she was taken with just one memory, a memory from the very beginning. They had been in Val Royeaux, and she came across a balloon vendor who had a big gold hat, and he knew who she was, so he gave her one for free. The balloon was red and big and beautiful, and it was this big to-do, but Sene had never even seen a balloon before the Inquisition, so she did not understand the physics, and then she let it go by accident. It floated away, and that moment filled her with such feelings of failure and regret that she thought about hiding somewhere deep down in the guts of the world and crying forever, never looking back.

But then there was Solas. He bought her another, and this time, he told her to tie it to her bracelet, which was made of leather and now that she thought of it, she hadn't seen or worn that bracelet in a very long time. But anyway, she did what he told her to do, and the balloon stayed put. Now, she understood. Usually, Solas would have teased her for stupid stuff like this, but for whatever reason, he seemed to get it this time, and it was different.

After, while Cassandra was arguing with Lord Seeker Lucius who they would later learn had been corrupted beyond comprehension, Sene and Solas took a walk down to the docks, and he kept his hands in his pockets the whole time. Nobody bothered them. This was way before anything, and way before Sene was named Inquisitor, and way before Skyhold, and they were all still just living their relatively carefree summer camp lives: Haven, snowscapes, chasing one another down on rooftops while the Breach sucked and smacked from its place at the very center of the sky. Back then you could always find the danger. It was easy to locate and easy to see. Like when you're a child, and it's the simple things that scare you, like the dark. But as you get older, you suddenly begin to realize that it's actually all the things inside the dark that are of real danger, and that as you push around and touch them, they want to push around and touch you back. They want to hurt you, and then the world gets bigger, and the dangers get more and more complicated and insidious, and you don't want to be in the dark anymore. So you start searching for somebody who can turn on the light. Put a butterfly into a jar and set it on the nightstand. Make love to you until you can't feel or see anything, and nothing else matters but bed sheets. It's the truth. Because then, at least in theory, you're safe.

But that day out on the docks in Val Royeaux, it was before the love and the sex and the takeover. They were just friends, and Solas stood there with his hands in his pockets, and he told her something very important. Looking back, it was probably the closest he'd ever come to telling her the truth about himself, the truth that she had, as time went by, admittedly avoided in favor of comforting him. She just wanted him to be okay, to belong to her. _When I was nineteen,_ he said, looking out at the sailboats. _I let a lot more float away up into the sky than one fucking balloon._ Then he looked at her. She knew now that she should have been thinking about something serious, but at the time, all she could think was that he was tall. He was so tall. His hands were as big as stars. He kept them hidden. _You would not have liked me back then, Sene,_ he continued. He grew wistful. _I can promise you that._

She fell in love with him right then, watching as he watched the sailboats and told her this great big truth about his life. What had he let go into the sky? Why wouldn't she have liked him? He was so tall and handsome and wistful, and she had a balloon tied to her bracelet, the balloon that he'd bought for her, and in the end, she didn’t even think to ask him. They hadn’t even kissed yet. She was in love with him, and they hadn’t even kissed yet, and she didn't even think to ask him.

Now, they'd won many battles, though some of them they'd lost, and yet, they seemed to be able to hold on through anything. _He would marry you tonight, if given the chance,_ said Mythal. It had jarred her, though she wouldn't show it. She was twenty years old and she had all these feelings and they were stretching and stretching, and now, the only thing she knew was the same thing she'd known all along, which was that she did not know how to love him, she could not properly love him, and finally she knew why. She had been a virgin and he had been a god, and there's a reason these stories never work out in the end. Because there is always somebody else. There is always something bigger, and the virgin doesn't get it, or if she does, then she ends up on fire, her eyes burning out of her head, and yet, she will not give up until she looks upon the raw, unbridled truth of him. It was bullshit, but it was true. Solas had made many promises along the way. He had brought her bells and he had made many butterflies and he'd said sweet things, but for all Sene saw and for all she knew now, they were empty. They were floating away, up into the sky. They were some fucking balloons, and she was afraid that if she did not bury her love, she would lose that, too.

_To your love, Inquisitor.  
_

_Fuck you._

Leave it to the assassin. She felt a fool, wholesale. She was done, and she knew it. She sat alone in that stupid brig, held hostage like some sort of victim, and she cried.


	39. There Goes the Redhead

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Youth is an imposter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _cw: some obsessive compulsive behavior, reference to torture_

“It is all very certain,” said Mythal. “The way that I died.”

The room was dark, like in a cold, wet shadow.

“How did you die," said Morrigan. "Mythal."

“At the hands of wolves,” she said.

“At the hands of wolves?” said Morrigan. “You speak in tongues of ancient lore. Is that some sort of passage in translation?”

Mythal almost laughed at this. “Translation? No. This story is full of wolves, Morrigan, just not the one you think. Can’t you see? If I tell you, it's going to ruin your evening.”

“We’re trapped in a dungeon,” said Morrigan. “I am separated from my child by stone legions of walls and possibly axe murderers. My evening is already ruined.”

“Yes, your child,” said Mythal, becoming dreamy. “I never got one of those."

"Do not attempt to throw me off balance," said Morrigan. "I know you wish to speak of it. Otherwise you would not have brought it up. I cannot imagine the last time you spoke of this to anyone. Have you ever? Have you ever told anyone the truth of how you died, Mythal?"

"I died in my own palace, Morrigan," she said. "By the footstep of a mirror. Sorrow found me. It was simple.”

“Sorrow,” said Morrigan. “That is Abelas?”

“Yes,” she said. “Abelas. He is simple. A simple kind of boy. I don’t mean stupid. He is anything but stupid. I just mean that he is uncomplicated. He is not like Solas. He sees things for what they are, and he goes right to them. He is practical. He saw me, bleeding by a mirror. He went right to me.”

“Who did it?” said Morrigan.

“It was a war, Well-drinker,” said Mythal. “Seven noble families murdering each other in the streets, claiming slaves to build their armies. Who do you think did it?”

“The voices just say your enemies.”

“Sickly sweet enemies till the end,” said Mythal. “Arlathan was supposed to be my city. It was dead, but it was mine. It had been a fair game. We'd made it a sanctuary. But they no longer cared for the game. They hacked my mirrors to pieces, and they destroyed my Sentinels. Eight hundred golden boys, dead in a pool. When they found me, it was in the aviary. They laughed and murdered my birds. _We don’t want you,_ said Andruil. She was holding one of my birds, a white peacock, dead in her hand. _We want the Wolf._ The Wolf, she chanted. Fen’Harel. Her spindled head. She was entranced, psychotic. But I said nothing. I _did_ nothing. Because I _was_ nothing. It was his rebellion that was cutting into their reign, not mine. In his shadow, I was a leaf in decay.” She finally noticed then, that there was blood on her dress. This disturbed her. She showed it to Morrigan. “What is this?” she said, agitated. “What is this from?”

“It is from the assassin,” said Morrigan. “From the courtyard.”

"Did I do this?”

“No,” sad Morrigan. “The Commander did it. You merely got in the way.”

Mythal exhaled. She held out her hands, stretched them way out in front of her. “Oh,” she said, and then she got smaller, somehow. She sank away into the dark of the cell and hid her face. “He is an elegant man, isn’t he?”

“Why were you alone when they found you?” said Morrigan. “I do not understand. I thought Fen’Harel never left your side.”

“It was a rare moment of separation,” said Mythal, scratching at the blood with her thumbnail. “That night, Solas was with Ghilan’nain.”

“Ghilan’nain,” said Morrigan.

"Do not sound so surprised,” said Mythal. “They were friends. Another well-kept secret, I suppose, just like so many other fine little details of Solas’s life. Friends since childhood. But blood and time tore them apart. Ghil was a powerful witch, a General, just like Solas, but her life and her mind had been destroyed by Andruil. She had nothing in the end. Solas trusted her, still. Never trust a woman at the end of her rope, Morrigan. He gave her a key to the mirrors. He wanted her to have the option of defecting, of joining us. I think she would have. But she was not brave. She was not Sene, and everything was very complicated, and one day, she saw the two of us, what we had become, through a window, and I can’t imagine what it must have been like for her, but certainly it was awful enough to make her change her mind, and though it is probably true that she was already off her hinges, this broke her altogether. She betrayed him.”

“They were lovers?" said Morrigan.

“They were not lovers,” said Mythal. “Or, they had been, when they were young. Very young. But it was puppy love. When they were nineteen, twenty. Youth is an imposter. You asked me if I was jealous of Sene. Well, I will admit that I am. In some way. But there is a difference between jealousy and envy. One is ugly. One is poison. After she saw us, Ghilan’nain went to Andruil. She told her where I was and how to use the mirrors to get into my castle. Andruil told Elgar’nan, and Elgar’nan, that beast, told the rest of them.” She flexed her hands, the cords taut beneath her skin. She was gathering the memories, like little landmines into a basket. “They tortured me,” she said. “They took the eyes out of my head, trying to get me to tell them where he was. Meanwhile, she was with him. In the fortress you now call Skyhold, she was with him, and she knew the whole time. Of course, I broke for nothing, and so eventually, they got bored and killed me. All my noble brethren. I died. It was a bad, bad day. And when Solas learned the truth, his heart broke. And he hunted them down in vengeance, all of them, including his precious Ghilan’nain, and he imprisoned them in their separate boxes, and to keep them there, he built the Veil, and this, as you put it so poetically to your human child in your lovely covered wagon, _ended the world_.”

Morrigan was freezing cold. She realized then how hard she’d been clutching herself down in that jail cell. Her arms hurt. She felt fragile. “That is terrible,” she said. "I am sorry, Mythal."

“Me, too."

“But you do not look dead,” said Morrigan. “That is your true body, is it not?”

Mythal looked away, her brown eyes bare. “One does not get to be a woman of my particular legend without understanding the importance of contingencies, Morrigan. Just ask your mother.”

“What happened with Solas?”

Mythal became a little hazy after that. "He slept," she said. "I wandered. Sometime later, he found a piece of me in the Fade. I lose track of the years, how many had gone by. But I was just a whisper, so he anchored me. He built me a home—a tower with a window so that I could take shape. He stayed for a little while, but he was shredded by guilt for what he had done, and things were never the same.” She became very quiet after that. She seemed like she might cry. “Over the years,” she went on, “some part of him began to blame me for everything that happened. Ghil, his mother. So he left, and I stayed in my tower, and I watched the old world die, and the new world struggle and grow, and I did not see him or hear from him again for a long, long time. We did not get an ending, Solas and me. Whatever we might have had, it was stolen from us. It has since lost its form. It all just hangs in the air now. Twisted. Like spiderwebs. One gets to sticking after a while.”

She had begun to wring her hands. The behavior was obsessive. Morrigan reached, held her by the wrist. She had not done much reaching in her life, but there seemed to be these moments lately in which the instincts of motherhood could not be ignored. “Calm yourself,” she said.

Mythal quieted after that, closed her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“Mythal,” said Morrigan, still holding her by the wrist. “Why is none of this left over? Why are the voices so vague?”

“Because Sorrow scrubbed it from the Well,” said Mythal, looking down at Morrigan’s knuckles. “He could not take it anymore, and I don’t blame him. Poor mockingbird. He always did what he was asked. His life is a tragedy. My life is a tragedy. All I want now is for Solas’s life not to be a tragedy.”

“Then why did you tell Sene? You do not even realize what you’ve done.”

“I did not mean it,” said Mythal. “I swear. I did not mean it.”

“Of course you did not,” said Morrigan, trying hard, very hard. “Of course you did not mean it, Mythal, and yet, it has still come to pass.”

Mythal stood from the chair. She turned away to face the wall. She looked back up at that window, but the moon was gone now, and it was just starlight. But the stars here were dim and boring and full of winter’s nightmares. She could not go to the stars. Not anymore.

“He will be angry,” she said. “His rage will show. He will take this out on me. I will pay.”

“What about Sene?” said Morrigan. “Is she not paying as well?”

“Sene is young,” said Mythal, glancing over her shoulder. “She would like to fight her own battles, and she is brave in a brawl. We have all seen it. But with Solas, she is afraid. I should not have said anything to her. But she wanted it. I could see it in her eyes. She had been avoiding for so long, that she wanted to hear it from me so that she wouldn’t have to ask him. She doesn’t want to hurt him, and she doesn’t want to know the truth, and yet, if there is to be hope for the two of them, she must.”

“She must hurt him, or she must know the truth?”

“Both,” said Mythal, almost bitter. “Nothing lasts forever, Morrigan. Other than me, and possibly your mother, you of all people should understand this.” She looked back up at the window. She seemed to go in and out of focus, and in that moment, she commanded her space. A tiny woman with violent compulsions, but she did not lack for luster.

They were quiet for a long time. Morrigan found herself thinking about Kieran. Like a little lamp that will always shine, she thought. He would always love her. Even when she was haggard and tired from the day, or she said something sharp. He was waiting for the soft, because he needed to. It was a terrible power to possess and yet, it was necessary. She missed him desperately.

There was a noise then. It seemed the assassin had come awake. Now the Commander and the Spymaster were in some sort of argument over what to do next. It was terribly mundane. Their voices were loud and filled with conviction, though Mythal could not understand a thing they were saying. Such blind faith in these parts. She turned around, passed Morrigan, and went to stand in the doorway, to listen.

“It is evil,” she said. “The things they’ll have to do to get the truth.”

“You speak of torture,” said Morrigan.

“I know how he got inside,” said Mythal. “Him, and the others. I should have told you before.”

“What?”

“There is a mirror in the castle,” said Mythal. 

Morrigan bristled. It was a quiet revelation. Her boots clicked against the stone as she approached. “An eluvian?”

“Yes,” said Mythal. “I put it here many years ago, and I feel it now. Your assassins are elves who do not wear vallaslin. They must have somehow got a hold of the key.”

“They’re elves?” said Morrigan.

Mythal nodded. “I can feel my people from space,” she said. "You will have to deactivate it yourself. I have no power here. And once you do, I believe that you and your people and your bright son will be safe once again." She went back to the wall with the window. She sat down on the floor, and she reached out her hand, and she put it on the cold, hard stone. “He will wake soon,” she said. “I can feel it. He is close.”

 

Meanwhile, in the Fade, Solas was sitting with Sene in his mother's garden. He had finally found her. Whatever path he’d taken out of that winter place with the pier and the tower, it had lead him right back to his old house in the Weathers, and just like always, there she was. Waiting. It was easy to take for granted that she would always be there, but he didn’t know this yet. He was just living the dream.

They were together in the grass, looking up at the pink sky. Smack in the middle, there was the Breach. A churning, circle nightmare. Like a great, sucking wound, it was not supposed to be there and yet, there it was. But for whatever reason, it did not feel like an enemy that day. It was just weather. So she had her knees in the air, and she wore a dress of yellow sunlight and she had tied her red hair back in a blue ribbon. He kept staring at it, because that ribbon was familiar, though Sene did not usually wear hair ribbons. She wore pins. Ribbons were too fussy for her. He remembered how she wore one during their first trip to Val Royeaux, and it got so caught, Josephine had to cut it out with scissors. How had he remembered this? Where did it come from?

In any case, time moved strangely here. Backward, still. Like the cogs were spinning in the wrong direction, and while he was certain that she was the same as she had always been, he felt different. He felt unrefined and plodding, almost like a teenager. He was completely bereft of wisdom and, in this, terrified, but pure. It was euphoric. The world smelled of thyme and roses. It smelled like Sene. He wanted to claim her right there in the weeds, but he wasn’t sure how. She was like wildflowers growing straight out of the earth. She was just like plants. So strong and so beautiful and so loud with the vast and varying orchestras of nature. He could barely do anything but stare at her and hope from moment to moment that she would, somehow, stare at him back.

“Are you ever gonna wake up?” she said after a while.

“What?” he said.

“Everyone’s waiting. It’s dark down here, Solas.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. She was on her back, but he was sitting with his elbows on his knees, shredding a fat leaf between his fingers. “Apparently, I got very lost.”

“You hit your head,” she said, sitting up. Her freckles punched him in the face. “You got messed up. It was scary.”

He smiled. “Do you know the way out? Or shall we stay forever.”

But she was privy to his lines. “I don’t know anything about this place,” she said. “I think I might be a figment of your imagination.”

“If you were a figment of my imagination,” he said, “then you would know the way out.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Hmm.”

She looked around then. “Does time feel strange here to you, Solas?” she said. “I think it is abnormal.”

“I think you're right," he said.

She took his hands, examining the shiny, scribbly scars on his knuckles. “How old are you?”

“I thought I was thirty,” he said, relaxed. “I think I might even be thirty-one by now. My birthday is in the winter months. I can’t recall.”

“I would like to celebrate your birthday,” said Sene. “I would like to eat birthday cake with you.”

He lifted her chin so that he could see her. “We will do that,” he said. “One day.”

“You don’t look thirty-one, Solas,” she said. “I don’t think you’re even close to thirty-one.”

“How old do I look?”

“You look much younger than when we first met.”

“When did we meet?”

“Maybe a year ago? But you look like you’re eighteen. Possibly a little older. You’re big, and you’re tall, but you’re so skinny.”

“Excuse me?”

“Yeah, look at you. Skin and bones.” She smiled, tugged at his shirt. “Your clothes hanging off you like some sort of puppy. You’re all paws. I like it when you’re this young.”

“You do?”

“Because you’re like me,” she said. “You’re new.”

He put the hair behind her ear then, an impulse. Such a raw moment. He loved her so much, it was like his heart being scraped from his chest with the blade of a shovel. And yet it was so unfocused. It was everywhere, and it didn’t have a name yet. He needed action. So he leaned in, and he kissed her. She tasted good. He could have kissed her all day.

She laughed as they parted. “I’m the older woman,” she said.

“I like you,” he said, smirking. He opened his eyes. “What was your name again?”

"Sene,” she said, poking him on the nose. “I bet that one worked on all the Arlathan girls.”

“Only the boring ones,” he said, playing with her hair. “Sene.” The world smelled like fire all of a sudden.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“You would not have liked me back then, Sene.”

She looked concerned. The clouds in the sky turned dark. “Yes I would have.”

“No,” he said. “You wouldn’t have. But I would have liked you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re tall,” he said, using both hands to push the hair off her face completely, kissing her again. “You are the tallest woman I have ever loved.”

But she was looking over his shoulder now as he held her face in the palm of his hand. He wanted more kissing, but she was distracted.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

“Who’s that?” she said.

He turned around. There was a woman standing on the other side of the white-painted fence, a small thing, wrapped in gold amidst the purple daises. It was Mythal. She waved.

“That is the wrong way,” he said, shaking his head. “I have already been there. Some parts of me want to go back, because it’s easy. But I shouldn’t.”

“What’s easy about it?” said Sene.

"She lets me win,” he said. “She always has. It’s out of guilt, at least in part. But you can’t have a life with that.”

“Do I let you win?” said Sene.

He looked at her. She was smiling, leaning back on her palms. He looked at his hands, and he came together all of a sudden, right inside that very moment. He became a man. Strange how it feels when it all happens at once. Like crystallizing, becoming solid. He knew exactly what he wanted. “No,” he said. “Or, only in the good ways.”

“You’re old again,” she said.

“Old?” he said.

“You know what I mean. Old _er._ You’re you.”

“Does that scare you?”

He could sense her avoiding. He knew the answer.

“Sene?”

“Sort of,” she said. “I think I’m freaking out.”

“I want to be with you, Sene,” said Solas. “Tell me what I have to do.”

“You might have to let me run this time,” she said, squinting into the sunlight. Her knees went back and forth. She was serious, but she was also relaxed, resigned to the truth. “I'm pretty flustered. Can you do that?"

“I cannot do that.”

“You must,” she said. “You know it, too.”

“When?” he said. “Isene, are you already gone?”

“No,” she said, smiling. “There’s a job to do." Together, they looked at the Breach. "Whenever you’re ready, just come to the place where the end begins. That’s where you’ll find me.”

He stared at her. “Please, don’t run, Isene,” he said.

She shrugged. “I can’t take it anymore. I’m not cut out for all this bullshit. I’m always fighting. Don’t you think?”

There was an ocean of pain between them. They loved each other, but it was all so fast. It’s hard to make things right all at once when there’s the end of the world breathing straight into your face. He reached across the entire ocean. He held her hands, and they were tangled in seaweed. “Yes, I do,” he said. “I have always thought that, _avise’ain_.”

His mother called then, from the porch. It was a surprise. She was standing there holding a yellow bucket and wearing a raincoat, her black hair braided over her shoulder, her face divine and clear as glass. “It looks like rain,” she said. “Come inside, you two.”

Mythal was gone.

“Let’s go,” said Sene, sweet and wide open and ready. It was clear to him now that this was not really Sene. She was, in fact, just a figment, and he wasn’t sure if this was better or worse. Sometimes, he had to admit, he knew her better than she knew herself.

She tugged the blue ribbon out of her hair and discarded it. It sort of flew away and got tangled in the rose bushes. He watched it, whipping there, making him remember. Sene seemed unaffected by their conversation. She just wanted to go around and do things. She should not have been at the Conclave. She should not have been the Inquisitor. And now, she was going to run. There was no way of knowing when or where or why or how she was going to run. Only that she would, and that it would sneak up on him. It would come when he least expected it, just like everything else.

“Okay,” he said. “But first, will you tell me the story of your life?” He smirked. He used his charm as he was wont to do. He couldn’t help it. It was their thing.

She picked up his hands. She kissed his knuckles. “We are in it,” she said, melting into him so that he could feel everything. “We are in the story of my life.”

We are in it, she said.

 

He woke up.

It was morning and winter.

“Mother,” came a small voice, emphatic and bright. “Look.”

He was not alone. When he opened his eyes completely, a woman came into view. He almost wept. Small and covered in knitting, hair black. For a moment, he thought he had died.

“Solas?” said the woman. “Are you with us?”

But it was just Morrigan. He shook out his brain. This hurt. He tried to sit up, backing into the bed frame. Brass, cold. But this hurt, too. And all at once, he remembered everything. The dragon, the fall, the Fade. It was fuzzy, but it was there.

“Yes,” he said. He pushed the heel of his palm into his eyeball and rubbed. “I am with you.” Definitive.

Morrigan sat down beside him. She took his hand. Then, the boy appeared. He held a glass of water. He was a little bird and yet, he was tall and narrow and very strong for his age. He hopped up on the bed to Morrigan’s annoyance. Solas waved it off. It was okay.

“Here,” said Kieran. “Mother said you’d be thirsty.”

Solas smiled. Or, he tried to. He looked around. The room was beautiful and the sun crushed through the windows in yellow beams. This was Suledin Keep. He’d never been inside before. The last time he was here, he’d left in a hurry. “Thank you, Kieran,” he said. “In just a moment, perhaps.”

Kieran understood. He set the glass of water on the bedside table.

Solas rested his head against the brass. He looked at Morrigan. He felt desperate. “How long?” he said.

“Nearly eighteen hours,” she said. “Six more, and I would have gone in after you myself.”

He sighed, but he could feel his ribs—cracked, two of them. The pain was tremendous. He could see the dust in the air, floating around in the sunlight. “Where is Sene?” he said.

She smiled, but it was strained. She directed Kieran to leave the room, something about going to find the healer. Solas said he didn’t need a healer. But the moment the boy was gone, Morrigan became serious. He could feel time now, passing, every shred of it. The right direction, but a bleak onslaught, an attack on the present. He knew something was wrong.

“What is it?” he said.

“Solas,” she said, still holding his hand.

“Is she all right?” he said.

“Yes,” said Morrigan, realizing what she’d done. “Yes, she’s quite all right. Of course she is.”

He shifted. He exhaled. He could have hit the floor. He pushed back. He grabbed onto the metal bed posts behind him, and he wrenched himself into a sit. He put his legs over the side of the bed, and this made him dizzy and thirsty and his body was fucked up, but he didn’t care. He’d endured worse. He leaned forward, dropped his head between his knees. “You might have started with as much.”

“Take it easy,” said Morrigan, her hand on his back. “I am sorry. I did not mean to startle you like that.”

“Poorly executed,” he said. “You should work on your bedside manner.”

This almost served to make her laugh, but the situation at hand was sort of like a meteor, crashing through the ceiling and killing them both. “I will keep that in mind,” she said. “Solas, there are several things you need to know.”

“Such as?”

“Well, first of all, while you slept, two elven assassins tried to murder Sene in the courtyard.”

“What?” he said.

“Yes. It was quite the adventure. One of them, she ducked, and Cullen reared into him rather violently with the butt of his sword. The other, Sene head-butted. That assassin had her neck broken by Leliana.”

“Sene head-butted an assassin?” he said.

“Indeed. The first one still lives, despite his badly broken nose. He is already on his way back to Skyhold with the Spymaster. We were in the brig all night while agents of the Inquisition cleared the castle. It turns out there is an eluvian here. It is suspected that this is how the assassins were able to enter the keep undetected.”

“A mirror?” he said, so strange. It was what she’d said as well. “Can you sense it? Does the Well enable you to do that?”

She sort of cleared her throat. She removed the shawl from her shoulders and folded her hands in her lap. “No,” she said. “But that brings me to the next piece of information you need to know before you leave this room.”

“Which is what?”

“Mythal,” said Morrigan. “She is the one who told me about the eluvian. She is here.”

He turned his head, eyes narrowed. He was a big man there beside her. Bigger than Matthew had been in both stature and demeanor, but the two of them were such similar specimens with the heroics and the pride, that the more time she spent with Solas, the more she began to realize exactly what it was to deal with men of such considerable stoicism.

You mother them.

“What do you mean she is here?” he said. “Flemeth?”

“No,” said Morrigan. “Mythal. She seems to have used her various corporeal connections to our world as a way of manifesting in corporeal form. I think your slumber might have had something to do with it. A temporary weakening of the Veil, perhaps. That is, however, an ill-advised theory that I blame entirely on the fact that, along with Sene and Mythal and Leliana and the Commander, as well as Sene’s failed assassin, I was locked in the brig last night for nine solid hours.”

He looked at her. She could feel his focus, peeling back her layers in ways that even she could not control. Hedge mage to hedge mage. He was reading her, suspicious. He seemed to be reading her mind.

"You are not lying,” he said.

“No, I am not lying.”

“How can this be."

"I said earlier, I have only theories. But it is her. I speak the truth."

“Where is Sene,” he said. "Right now. Where is she."

“I’m not sure.”

“Is she with her?"

"No."

"Was she with her, last night? In the brig. At any time."

“Yes."

He watched her closely. "What happened."

"Solas," said Morrigan.

"What happened."

“You should know,” she said. “Mythal—she is not right. There are pieces of her...missing. I don't believe she has any idea what she's done."

He sort of bit back something inside, she could sense it. Anger. He breathed in hard through his nose.

"In any case," continued Morrigan. "I do believe she told Sene everything.”

“Everything,” he said. His voice got deep, almost like gravel. She could see the cords in his neck, the lump in his throat as he swallowed. "Be specific."

“She knows about Fen’Harel," Morrigan said. “As do I, obviously. She knows that you built the Veil. She knows about your relationship with Mythal. It happened very quickly. There was nothing I could have done.”

She watched him then, physically lose his breath and then gather it back in again. But something was gone from inside him. It was a massive undertaking as he seemed to be in a great deal of pain. He pressed his forehead into his hands, his body very tense, but he said no more.

“She was upset,” Morrigan went on. “She cried. Though learning that you were Fen’Harel did little to upset her, she did not seem prepared to deal with Mythal as your ex-lover. So she hid herself. She would speak to no one. The moment we were cleared to leave the brig, she argued with the Commander and eventually promised him that she would stay within the walls of Suledin Keep. Of course, he knows nothing, only that she was upset. She would not see me, though I gathered all of this from my read on her energies and from Mythal herself, who is currently in the brig, by the way. She is not a prisoner. She just did not want to leave.”

Solas was very still. His jaw clenched. He seemed to be staring at something that he alone could see.

“Solas,” said Morrigan.

“Yes,” he said.

“I must repeat that I do not believe Mythal came here for any purpose other than to help you."

"To help me?" he said. "Are you serious?"

"She did not intend to hurt Sene," she said. "As I said earlier, she is not in her right mind.”

“Yes well," said Solas. “That would be typical. Where is Sene. Do you have any idea.”

Morrigan sighed. “She must be here on the grounds, somewhere,” she said. “Where, specifically, I cannot say. Cullen may know, as he almost certainly had her followed. I can send for him, if you like.”

_Come to the place where the end begins._

Solas picked up his heavy head. “Don't do that,” he said. He took one final breath. He knew exactly where she was. "I will find her."

 

It took him some time, but he did get out of that room, and he did get onto his feet, and he did drink water, and he did get his head back. He got it right back. He was a tough specimen, and he would persevere. He finally found her at the top of the crow’s nest. It was new and had been constructed on the battlement where, several months back, before the slivers and the pangs, he had saved Sene's life from a deep stab wound to the back. He had gotten there with help from Kieran, who knew nothing of the truth, but was very good at evading crowds—a talent he had most certainly gathered from his time at the Winter Palace—and somehow, they’d made it there in complete secret. Nobody knew but them.

He had to muster all of his focus to get up the ladder, divert the pain. It was tragically high and otherwise impossible to get his arms over his head, let alone pull his own weight. It worked, but by the time he got to the top, he was exhausted. She was there, just as he'd suspected, sitting on the floor, beside the chair, her red head hanging between her knees. She seemed to be asleep. He crawled on hands on knees. He stopped just short of her and collapsed backward, leaning against the opposite wall. The crow’s nest of Suledin Keep was small and circular, built for two. It was cold up there, and windy. The Inquisition flag whipped out overhead, striking triumph and fear into the hearts of their enemies. There was not a cloud in the sky.

She looked up, slowly. He caught his breath as he waited, one knee up, desperate, and when she saw him, he could feel her soften. Even if just for the moment. He could tell she had been crying, and now, she was crying again. With relief.

“Sene,” he said.

“You’re awake,” she said.

"So are you," he said.

He thought she would come to him at first, but she didn't. She seemed to stop herself. This had the power to break him, but he held on. She smiled. She didn't come to him. Fine. The pain returned, like the entire left side of his chest being pried open with a crowbar. This made him gasp. It brought tears to his eyes. He lost his pride trying to bite down on something, but there was nothing there. He swore. He leaned.

“How did you get here?” she said, taking in his condition. “You’re hurt."

“Focus,” he said, gathering his breath. “A lot of it.”

“When did you wake up?”

“An hour ago,” he said. "Maybe two. I've lost track."

At this, she drew her tall knees to her chest. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there."

“It is all right,” he said.

She wouldn’t look at him. She seemed ashamed. "It's not all right."

He waited, patiently, for her to look at him again. When she finally did, he could feel her coming into awareness. He ceased the moment.

"What is it?" she said.

"You know," he said.

"I know what."

"That I am Fen'Harel," said Solas. "As well as everything that goes along with it."

This seemed to surprise her at first, hearing him say the words. She was quiet. She blinked several times. "Do you know about Mythal?"

"Yes, I do."

"Have you seen her?"

He shook his head. "No, Sene. I have not."

Everything was barbed. He felt raw and heavy and without a shred of recourse. He had felt like this with Sene before, but never to this magnitude. She had never once looked at him as if she did not know him, but that was how she looked at him now. That day, in the crow’s nest. They were strangers.

"Let's talk," he said.

Her green eyes were puffy. She wiped them self-consciously on the back of her hand and looked away, dejected. “You should have told me,” she said.

He closed his eyes. "I know."

“You had so many chances. We were there, Solas. We were at your old house, and yet, nothing. What happened?”

“What do you mean?” he said, opening his eyes.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because it was complicated," he said. "Because I knew that this would happen.”

“That what would happen, Solas? That you would nearly get killed by a dragon in the Emprise du Lion? That you would be knocked unconscious for eighteen hours? Or that, in the wake of all this, Mythal, your ex-lover would somehow come back from the dead and show up, unannounced, on my doorstep, rattled out of her mind, and sounding suspiciously like she still loves you?”

He put the back of his head to the wall, hard. It made a loud noise. She flinched. But he barely felt a thing. “It was thousands of years ago, Sene," he said. "I know there is no way for you to understand that."

“You have no idea what I’m feeling, Solas," she said. "What I’m thinking. What I’m capable of. You have no idea. That’s why you’re up here.”

He stared at her. "Then tell me," he said.

“I don’t care about Fen’Harel,” she said. “Mythal told me all about that. She told me about the Dread Wolf, that it’s bullshit. She told me about the Veil. Those are important things you failed to tell me, but I'll get my head around them, because they don’t change me. They don’t change who I am to you.” Then, she looked at him. Really looked at him. She was suspicious and frightened and angry. Her eyes were raw, and they unloaded everything into him. Everything. “She said the two of you were together for ten years. Ten years, and you kept it a secret. She’s Mythal, Solas. You know what that means. Otherwise, you would not have offered to remove her slave markings from my face in Crestwood.”

“That is not why I did it,” he said. “That was for you, Sene. It had nothing to do with her.”

“Bullshit,” said Sene. She shook her head. She looked at her boots. She looked at the floor. “How can you say that?”

“Have you finished with me, Sene?” he said, the words like white bricks, falling from high in the sky. “Is this the end? Because I did not tell you about the woman with whom I experienced the most traumatic events of my life? Events I had effectively repressed until a few months back, in Crestwood, and have since worked tirelessly to figure my way through, piece by piece. Is that it? Should I let you go?”

This bit into her. She hid her face.

“I am sorry about Mythal,” he went on, shaking his head over and over. “I am shocked to learn of her arrival. I should have seen this coming. I’ve had my head in the sand. Everything that has happened here is my fault. Everything. But this is very complicated. Please do not jump to conclusions. Not with this. Please, Sene.”

“Did you love her?” said Sene, very quiet. The whole world gone quiet. There was wind in the trees and in the sky and the stone and the wolves below. It was getting cold now.

“Yes,” he said. “I loved her. She filled a void during a very particular time in my life. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”

“Do you still love her?”

“No,” he said.

“How can that be?” she said. “You said you experienced the most traumatic events of your life with her. She said you were together for ten years. She was murdered. Your lover died. I almost died once. I saw what that did to you. That’s not right, Solas. It’s not right what happened. How can you let that go?”

“Time,” he said. “A great deal of time.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I know you don’t understand. That is why I am trying to explain it to you.”

“I don’t want to know,” she said.

“That is different,” he said. “What don’t you want to know?”

“About her. About you and her.”

“What are you so afraid of, Sene?” he said. “I loved her. Yes. She was important to me. But it’s over. Things happened that cannot be taken back. That is the past. That is far away in the past. Can’t you see?”

“I’m nobody,” she said, confused. “I can't love you like that. I can’t be her.”

“What does that mean to you?” he said. “That means nothing to me.”

“It means everything.”

“You are the woman that I love,” he said, matter of fact now. Entirely certain, but frustrated and holding out his hands in surrender. “You are the woman that I want. It has taken me thousands of years, but I am here now. I am yours. Take me. Do what you will with me. Dispense with me for all I care, but know that I don't want her. I don’t want to be with anyone else. I want you, Sene. Only you.”

“I’m tired, Solas,” she said. “I’m so tired.”

“I know.”

“I'm sick of this. I’m sick of being here.”

“I know, vhenan.”

“I want to go home,” she said. “I can’t do it anymore.”

“Which part?” he said. “All of it? Or just me.”

She was crying now, on the other side of that crow’s nest, her back pressed to the wall. He was helpless and resigned and in pain and simply waiting for her to leave him there. He was just waiting.

But then, there was a noise. Familiar, but new. A crack. Everything stopped.

The anchor. It hadn't gone off in such a long time, they'd almost forgotten what it sounded like. She looked at her hand, the sparks, green, and then she looked at Solas. Questioning, so pure. In that moment, she was exactly as she had been the very first time he ever met her. Red-haired and freckled. Terrified and young.

 

_“My name is Solas,” he said, very serious, very still, hands in his pockets as he watched her, “if there are to be introductions. I am pleased to see you still live.”_

_Sene glanced around. She looked at her hand. Scribbly, green thing of death. She looked at him, the man named Solas. He was stern and mean and big like an anvil. He knew it. Too tall for an elf. But so was she._

_So she turned around, and she ran. Very quickly. She just ran away._

_Cassandra, of course, swore under her breath._

_“There goes the redhead,” said Varric, laughing as he reloaded his crossbow. “You ever chased away a girl that fast before, Chuckles? Or is this a first for you.”_

_“You’d be surprised,” said Solas._

_“The two of you sit here and joke,” said Cassandra. “I’m going after her.”_

_Solas took his hands out of his pockets. He straightened his gloves, then he put them back in again. “Let me,” he said._

_“You?” said Cassandra._

_“She’s Dalish,” he said, “and obviously quite young. At the very least, I am another elf. She’ll trust me.”_

_Varric stowed his crossbow, spat into the weeds. “The man’s got a point, Seeker.”_

_Solas smiled._

_Cassandra rolled her eyes. “Fine,” she said. “But you’d better not fail, apostate.”_

_“I do not fail,” he said. “Seeker.”_

 

“Solas?” she said, growing frantic. There she was in front of him now. Same time, same place. “It won't stop.”

But he was caught in the backdraft, staring at her. He was caught in the redhead. This was the end, and he knew it. Or maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was just some new beginning. But every once in a while, at this point in his life, he got so fucked up he could hardly see the difference anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For more backstory on Solas and Ghilan'nain, check out my work _[Teen Wolf](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8623606/chapters/19773958)_.  <3
> 
> As always, thank you for reading!! ^_^


	40. Check.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Buffy: I don't want to be the one.  
> Spike: I don't want to be this good-looking and athletic. We all have crosses to bear.
> 
> - _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ , "Touched"

_“There goes the redhead,” said Varric, laughing as he reloaded his crossbow. “You ever chased away a girl that fast before, Chuckles? Or is this a first for you.”_

_“You’d be surprised,” said Solas._

_“The two of you sit here and joke,” said Cassandra. “I’m going after her.”_

_Solas took his hands out of his pockets. He straightened his gloves, then he put them back in again. “Let me,” he said._

_“You?” said Cassandra._

_“She’s Dalish,” he said, “and obviously quite young. At the very least, I am another elf. She’ll trust me.”_

_Varric stowed his crossbow, spat into the weeds. “The man’s got a point, Seeker.”_

_Solas smiled._

_Cassandra rolled her eyes. “Fine,” she said. “But you’d better not fail, apostate.”_

_“I do not fail,” said Solas. “Seeker.”_

_Where he found her, she had retreated into nature, pure Dalish girl. She was afraid, but she didn’t cower. Fight or flight. He found her sitting by the edge of the river, her hand stuck deep in a snow bank._

_“Trying to freeze it off?” he said, coming up behind her._

_She glared at him, some attic window. Hidden away. She took her hand out of the snow, shook it hard, and winced._

_He took this an an invitation, looked around, stretched out and tried to appear as a man of wisdom. He sat down beside her with his knees up. “Come back,” he said, squinting into the sun. “Sene.”_

_“No,” she said. She was abrupt, but she was not running._

_“What will you do instead?” he said. “Go back to your clan? The sky is falling, lethal’lan, and it seems that your magical hand is the key to our salvation.”_

_She glanced at him, at this lethal’lan business. He smirked._

_“Who are you?” she said._

_“I am nobody,” he said. “Who are you?”_

_“Nobody.”_

_“Then we have that in common.”_

_She sighed. She looked around like she was worried somebody might be watching. Then she showed him her hand. She flexed her fingers. It just looked like a typical hand at first. A young woman’s hand. Some freckles on the wrist and knuckles. “It’s vibrating,” she said to him. “It won’t stop.”_

_He turned toward her, slowly, but she seemed to trust him. She was only afraid of the mark. “Can I?”he said._

_She nodded and gave, easily. The window, open. He didn’t know it yet, but this was the secret of Sene. He took her hand into his. His was bigger, stronger. Hers was loose and unencumbered by anything other than the mark, and when he felt into its magic with his own, she sort of shivered._

_“What’s the matter?” he said, looking at her. “Did that hurt?”_

_“No,” she said, smiling all of a sudden. So fast. “I just–I felt something.”_

_“What did you feel?”_

_She stared at him. He could see her, attempting to gather thoughts she did not understand into a vocabulary she did not have. She was pretty. Her hair—it was very red and curly, difficult to tame. It had started to come loose at her temples, and this, this fertile still-life of her hair and how it was sort of bursting at the seams, it hit him like a gut punch. He wanted to kiss her right then. He almost did. It swelled his focus and fucked him up good. He found himself shaking out his head like some sort of animal. He had not truly looked at a pretty girl in years. And yet, somehow, in his body, and in his mind, he was young. After all this he was still just a man._

_She laughed._

_“What?” he said, coming to. He was still holding her hand. “What is so funny?”_

_She blushed, her freckles alight._

_“You,” she said._

 

Now. It is time.

“Solas?” she was saying, over and over again. “Solas?”

Same girl. She was right in front of him, holding him up by the shoulders, shaking him. She looked crushed into little bits and pieces of red morning. He knew her. He loved her. He must have dozed off.

"I’m fine,” he said, pressing a palm to his eye. “I’m fine, Sene.”

“Where were you?”

He looked up at her, holding his own face in his own rough hand. The question shocked him into existence. “What?”

“You fainted,” she said.

“Wait,” he said. “Isene.” He fell forward on his hands and knees. He crawled to her. He took her glowing hand. “This,” he said. “This. What does it feel like?”

“What do you mean,” she said.

“I mean can you sense…anything. A rift, Corypheus?”

“Corypheus?”

He was so close to her now, he could smell her, and it was right out of the blue and singing him home. He was blurry. It was like the beginning. He wanted to kiss her sort of like he wanted to fuck her and yet he was terrified because he knew the thing that haunted them and how it was down in the brig, and all then at once, he wanted to fall into a pile at her feet and pray that none of it had ever happened. None of it, and they were just two strangers on opposite ends of existence, ineffectual, magnets that would not touch. He looked around, the air like a hacksaw at his throat. It was cold all of a sudden. He saw the sky, and it looked like rain. Then, he saw Sene.

He must have seemed stern or intense, because she was frightened now. She shook her head. “Do you sense him?” she said. “Corypheus?”

“I’m not sure,” he said.

“Solas?”

“The magic is strong,” he said. “It is familiar.”

“Familiar?”

"Yes,” he said. “We should find Cullen.”

“Why?” she said.

“This entire landscape will be full of his feelers. If Corypheus is nearby, if that's what this is, he will know very soon.”

“Wait," she said. "What did you mean by familiar?”

“I meant what I said.”

“What aren’t you telling me?”

“What?”

“Is this your magic?” She held her hand out between them, flexed the fingers. She did not sound afraid anymore, only flustered. “I would not be surprised,” she said, “if you told me it was yours. You say it feels familiar, and from the very first day, that first fucking day by the river, there was always some connection between you and the mark. Just tell me, Solas. Tell me the truth.”

He stared at her, reading her face, trying to predict whether or not she was going to pick up and leave again. “Yes,” he said, in some sort of disbelief. Is that what it was? After all this time. He picked up her hand once more. “Yes. This is mine.”

“Does that mean the orb is yours, too?”

“Yes,” he said, astonished. “Very good, Isene.”

“I learn stuff,” she said. “I’m not stupid.”

“I have never once thought you were stupid.”

“What is it?” she said. "The orb. What is it?"

“It is a power source,” said Solas, studying her, the freckles and the sparks.“I built it before I built the Veil. I used it to store my magic."

"A power source?" said Sene. "That's all?"

He sort of furrowed. He did not know how to proceed. The truth was all there was now. "Yes," he said. "But after the Veil, I slept in the Fade, for literally thousands of years. I woke up, and I was too depleted. I could not get it to open. The world had changed so much."

"What does that mean?"

He ignored her. "So I traveled to Tevinter," he went on.

"What?"

"I was there, Sene," he said. "I was in Tevinter. I barely remember. It feels like a dream. It felt like a dream for a long time. I knew a great deal of this world, its history, Corypheus. All of it from the Fade. I left the orb, somewhere—I don't remember where, but I knew that Alexius would find it. I knew Corypheus had the power to get my magic out, but I thought he would die on impact. In its purest form, my magic is no small magic, Sene. There was supposed to be a fail-safe. But what we witnessed at the Temple—he had solved his mortality, a variable I had entirely neglected to take into account. The conclave—that was an accident. You were an accident. This is my fault.”

Sene stared, puffy-eyed and open-mouthed. "Solas," she said. “What the fuck?”

He shook his head. “Everything I’ve done," he said, "everything since Haven, has been an effort to rectify this mistake. But there was a time, when I first woke—I was so desperate. I was very fucked up, Sene. I was so confused. I thought I could get back what I lost. I thought that if I got my power back, I could fix it. I was wrong, of course. There is no getting back what I lost.”

“You mean Mythal?” said Sene.

He surfaced. Their eyes touched across a million miles of ocean. “Yes,” he said. “And much more.”

“I don’t understand,” said Sene.

“I know you don’t,” said Solas.

“No,” she said. “I understand you wanting to go back, and I get you being fucked up. That all makes sense. But what I don’t understand is what you told me before.”

“What did I tell you?”

“That you loved her, but that you don’t any longer. I don’t believe you.”

“Sene, what does it matter?”

“Because that’s not how love works, Solas. I don’t care if it’s been ten years or ten thousand. You didn’t fall out of love with Mythal. She was taken away from you. I don’t even know how it happened. I don’t know if it was violent or sudden, or something you feel like you could have prevented. Holy shit, Solas. That matters. All of it does. You can ask Morrigan. She lost Kieran's dad the same way. She's not over it."

“There is a difference, Sene,” he said. “Ten years is not ten thousand. There is a difference.”

“Don’t lie to me,” she said. “Don’t pretend like it doesn't matter. And don’t pretend you haven’t seen or spoken to Mythal in ten thousand years. She told me you went to her. I don’t know when or why. But I know you’ve seen her. And I know you were with her when you got lost in the Fade. I don’t—I don’t like it, but I get it. I just wish you’d stop lying.”

“What would you like me to say, Sene?” he said.

“I don’t know, Solas.”

“Would you like the truth?” he said.

“Yes."

“All right," he said. "Would you like me to tell you about my confusion? That, while I slept in the Fade, yes, I was with her. Again and again. And that while I was with her, right up until the last moment, I couldn’t even remember who you were? That I lost sense of where _I_ was? Who I had become? The choices I’d made. Our friends. And that because of this, and because of how easy it was to get lost, to go backward with Mythal, part of me is now terrified. That she is _here_. Somehow alive? After everything that happened. I’m terrified, because I know you're right, and because of this, I don’t know what it will be like to see her again, and I usually know what things will be like. My entire worldview is predicated on the notion that I know exactly what is coming at all times, and right now, I do not. Is that what you would like me to say, Isene? Would that make you happy?”

“Is that the truth?” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “That is the truth.”

She was quiet at first. She looked away, and she took her hand from his and wrapped it up in her sleeve. You could still see the green, whipping through the cotton. “Of course it doesn’t make me happy, Solas,” she said. “But at least you’re being honest. For once.”

“I know it is no consolation,” said Solas. “But everything else I've said today is true as well. Everything.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That it is you that I love,” he said. “You that I want. The past has bled me dry, it is no secret. Parts of it, I am clearly still hemorrhaging. But then there’s you. You claim to be nothing, that you could not possibly love me the way that she once did. Why? Because she had power? Because she was older? Because your clan worships her? Don’t forget who you are. Sene, to half the world, you are _everything_. Your people, your friends. Sera, Dorian, Bull. Cole. The Commander. Thom and Josephine. These are people you have rescued from themselves and from forces against which they, alone, stood no chance.”

“That was all an accident,” said Sene. “I’m just stumbling around, Solas. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.”

“And yet, here we are,” he said. “What about me, Sene?”

“What about you?”

“To claim you have done nothing for me—that is willful ignorance.”

“Excuse me?”

“You have given me every chance,” he said. “Most importantly, a chance at a life that, before now, I never even thought possible for myself. Do you know what that means to me? The possibility of sharing a life with you? Do you? And do you think that it was easy for me to propose that we visit your clan in Ansburg? A group of Dalish elves who will most certainly want nothing to do with me, who will disapprove of my very existence the moment we walk in the door. Let us not speak of the _Dread Wolf_ , or the fact that I removed your vallaslin. I am a mage and an apostate, with no considerable wealth and nothing to my name save for this fucking job. The Inquisition. A privilege you gave to me as well. Do you think that was some sort of joke, Isene? That I was kidding? You have given me friends. A stable cause. A home. Companionship. You make me better. Not since my mother was alive have I felt so singularly _better_.” He closed his eyes. He could feel the breath going out of him, slowly, like a leaky balloon, but he didn’t care. “Even if, after all this, I somehow manage to lose you, Sene—which would be all too fitting, let me assure you—I am thankful—I—” He lost his head then, completely. Things got hazy, and he began to lean. He was nauseous, heavy. Like ice.

But she caught him in time. He’d almost hit the floor. She said his name.

“Yes,” he said, steadying himself against her. “Yes. Sene.”

He looked at her. She had a good grip on his shoulders. “Sweet fuck,” she said, searching his face, hauling him up. “Take deeper breaths or something. Stop doing that.”

Her eyes were red and all out of sorts. He wanted to kiss them, to put them in his mouth. He put a piece of hair behind her ear instead. “I will try.”

But then, the anchor—splitting and green. It was louder now, and she seemed very worried—about him more than anything. So he gathered his strength, and he took her hand, covered her fist with his own, closed his eyes and calmed the magic. He couldn’t make it go away, but he could absorb its vibrations. He was very good at this. He smiled, some small piece of comfort. “A lot of things seem to be happening at once, don’t they?” he said.

This broke her a little, and he could sense her smiling, somewhere, just under the surface. “When it rains it pours,” she said.

“My mother used to say that,” he said. “When I was a kid.”

Teeth and lips and tongue, she finally laughed. “Everybody says that, Solas.”

Overhead, the clouds were big bruises in the sky, blotting out the sun. It was going to rain.

“I know,” he said. “But my mother loved the rain. So when she said it, she really meant it.”

 

Meanwhile, Cullen was in the courtyard. There were dead balloons everywhere mixed in with the dead leaves. Casualties from the night before. Dead balloons and dead leaves and dead cooks. A painful waste. They’d apprehended three more suspicious persons posing as servants—all were elves, and all were now on their way back to Skyhold with the axe man and Leliana. He had asked her seriously to postpone questioning until he got back, though in these kinds of scenarios, his words did not hold much water. Cullen was squeamish with torture, and if anything Leliana would defy his request simply to save him the moral conundrum. It can be confusing, being friends with the people you work with. For Cullen, it was very new, and so he had formed many habits with barriers and decorum that he was not entirely sure how to handle, but, in all honesty, he had grown so thankful and accustomed to his place as Commander of the Inquisition Army that it was becoming difficult to remember what his life had been like before. The loneliness. Such a great deal of fear.

At the moment, he was surrounded by a gaggle of five scouts who all seemed to need him at the same time. They were planning their exit from the Emprise du Lion, and this took some coordination, but with Harding on another mission and Leliana gone, he was in charge, entirely on his own, and while he was quite adept at handling men of the sword, _spies_ he found to be oddly obsessive in ways he did not care for. Needy. They wanted directive for everything. It was giving Cullen a headache, like dealing with children, and reminding him of the fact that he had not slept in about thirty-six hours. The day was already getting too far behind them. His face, a stubbled nightmare. Things were not smooth. And on top of all this, a storm was coming. He could see it on the horizon. The sky was windowless and steel.

“Your lack of self-sufficiency concerns me,” he finally said to the scouts. “Weren’t you the lot who were tasked with clearing the castle of assassins? Should the Inquisitor be watching her throat?”

“Scout Harding usually—”

“Scout Harding is in the Hinterlands,” said Cullen, wiping his forehead with a gray handkerchief. He then folded it delicately and placed it back in his pocket. “Protecting refugees. She is a far better person than I, and even so, she has entrusted you to me and so we are doing things my way.”

“But Ser—”

“Enough.”

Just then, he noticed Morrigan, wandering on the other side of the courtyard, looking lost. She was without Kieran. She dropped to her knees and picked up a piece of an old, red balloon. With the simple wave of a hand, she made it whole again. She tied it to a piece of yarn and then stood, in admiration, quite pleased with herself as it floated overhead. He was oddly mesmerized. At some point, he half-drifted as the scouts went on and on, and then, she waved at him. He waved back, but now, she was gesturing somewhat more seriously and coming his way, and the world locked in, almost with a click, and when he looked up, there seemed to be people everywhere—soldiers and all of them very upright. How much time had passed? Half these men he’d sent back to Skyhold with the Spymaster, and so he put his hand on the hilt of his sword, and he braced himself.

It was Leliana. She had returned. “At ease, Commander,” she said. There she was, looking rushed and disheveled. It was unlike her. Her hair had been thrown back into a loose ponytail, and there was a little blood on her armor. She took off her gloves one by one.

“What are you doing here?” he said, looking around. “Leliana. You’re supposed to be halfway to Skyhold by now.”

“I have bad news,” she said, rather abruptly.

"Spill it."

"Corypheus," she said. "He is making his move, Commander."

The sound of it, it was so unexpected, it took him a moment to process. They both looked up at the sky, deflecting for no reason at all. The clouds, they were not just gray anymore. They were coming alive. A lightning storm.

“What do you mean he is making his move?" said Cullen.

“No fewer than ten of my scouts have sighted him cresting the Frostbacks,” said Leliana. "He is advancing, rapidly. For all we know, the assassins were his. Reconnaissance. Either way, we are now trapped like flies in a frozen tundra."

“You can't be serious,” said Cullen. He looked at her, confused. “Half our troops are scattered throughout the west of Orlais. We’re entirely depleted.”

“He has been studying his tactics,” said Leliana.

"We need to evacuate the village," said Cullen. "Now."

"I have already ordered the evacuation, Commander.”

"To the quarry?"

"Yes. The quarry will be much easier to defend, in a pinch.”

"You mean should we fall."

She said nothing.

It was the end. He could smell it. Like charred silk on the wind. “What are you thinking, Leliana?”

“We could run,” she said.

“Go on,” he said.

“Create a diversion, lure him south. Move Sene and the warriors north, in secret. Possibly by way of the eluvian. This would buy us some time to consolidate, hope for Solas’s recovery.”

“Would that work?” said Cullen.

She shrugged, fully resigned. “With more time, perhaps. But in our current circumstances, it would be a blood bath. Those left behind would be slaughtered beyond recognition. Sahrnia would be no more."

"Sene would not allow that," he said. "I would not allow that."

"For once, Commander, we agree on all counts."

Morrigan stood beside him now as the wind picked up. When he sensed her presence, he looked at her, her bare face clean. No make-up. She looked tired, but she had one of these mild, pretty faces with the cheeks like apples. “Morrigan,” he said. “Did you hear.”

“Yes,” she said. “I did. You got everything right. I can sense him. Corypheus. I am sure Sene can as well, in her way."

"Where is she?" said Cullen.

"She is with Solas. Last I heard, they were in the crow's nest. He woke no less than two hours ago. I am surprised it’s taken you this long to hear.”

“What?” said Cullen.

“Indeed,” said Morrigan.

“What is his condition?” said Leliana.

“He’s getting around just fine,” said Morrigan. “Beyond that, arguable.”

“We need to gather everyone to the war room,” said Cullen. “Immediately.”

“I will retrieve them,” said Morrigan, gazing at the sky. Some long, purple web of lightning. A distant crack. “But then I am going to move my son through the eluvian back to Skyhold.” She looked at him. She held the balloon. He seemed to stare at it, in earnest confusion.

“We need you,” he said, staring at the string. Yellow yarn. The color of wheat. “To combat the dragon, you are our only hope.”

“I will be back in time,” she said, her hand on his shoulder. “Keep your eye on the sky, Commander."

An odd wisdom for a woman so young, he thought. She could not have been much more than thirty-two. The same as he was. Decidedly too young to die and yet, here they were.

 

When they didn't find Cullen in the war room, Sene and Solas wandered into the kitchens. They thought he might be with the eluvian for some reason. It was a stupid reason, but they were trying to cover all their bases, and of course, he was not. They did not find Cullen in the kitchens, but they did find Kieran, sitting on a sturdy tabletop, peeling potatoes. There were two elven servants as well who were cutting the peeled potatoes into chunks and dropping them into a heavy, cast iron pot over the stove. They were telling Kieran stories of the night before, when they were all evacuated from the castle during the search for assassins.

“We were hauled outside by the light of the moon and made to answer many questions,” said the first. She was young, much younger than Sene, maybe fifteen years old, and she had one of those thick Fereldan accents that chewed the words up like cold butter. “Some of us, they took away with sacks over there heads. But I didn’t know none of those.”

“Me neither,” said the second.

“I was with Mr. Solas,” said Kieran. “High in a tower.”

“Oh, my,” said the first.

“Yes. There were big men everywhere,” said Kieran. “Solas was one of them, but he was asleep. Obviously. He was the biggest of all.”

“Is he okay?” said the second. “Ser Solas?”

“He is,” said Kieran. “He is with the Inquisitor in the crow’s nest. They love each other. Did you know?”

The two servants smiled.

That is when Sene and Solas entered the room. They had been listening outside.

Kieran grinned. “There you are,” he said. “Both of you.”

“Both of us,” said Sene.

“Would you like to help with dinner?”

They looked at each other. A small, good thing.

“Yes,” said Solas. “We would love to, for a short while.”

He smiled at the servants who blushed furiously—both of them—and hurried out of the room. Sene sort of nudged him. It was funny. It was warm in there and smelled good like childhood. She hopped up on the table first, oddly relieved. He noticed this. Anything but duty. Anything. In this way, they were so different. Solas sat with his legs dangling off the edge. It took him a minute to get comfortable. Once he was set, Kieran handed him a carrot and a peeling tool, and then he immediately went to work. He had done this sort of thing a thousand times before. Sene sat, meanwhile, peeling the same potato, very slowly for a long time. Solas watched her. He thought she might peel that potato forever. She kept checking on him, from the corner of her eye. She was worried about him. On their way over, she’d pressed her palm to his cheek no fewer than three times to make sure he didn’t have a temperature.

“I am not sick, vhenan,” he’d said to her.

“Then what are you?”

He did not know how to answer.

Now, Solas drank another glass of water. It was starting to go down easier, and so he ate one of the carrots and then sat, chewing the stem. “Kieran,” he said after a while.

“Yes, Mr. Solas.”

“No _Mister._ We’ve talked about this.”

“I apologize _._ ”

“No need to apologize.”

“Go on. Solas.”

He cleared his throat. “We heard you talking to the servants about last night.”

“Did I miss something?” said Kieran.

“No, not at all. Granted, I would not know, seeing as I was asleep. But that’s not what I’m talking about.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You say there were a lot of big men in the room while the agents cleared out the castle.”

“There were. Big as trees.”

“Do you think I could take them?”

He glanced at Sene and smirked. She squinted at him.

“Absolutely,” said Kieran. “They’re all afraid of you, Solas.”

“I wonder why.”

“Perhaps it is because of your arrogance,” said Sene.

“Perhaps,” said Solas. “Though that seems unlikely.”

“No,” said Kieran. “It is because you’re an elf, and you’re _big for an elf._ That’s what one of them said. They’re not used to big elves. They’re afraid of Sene, too.”

Solas laughed.

“They are not,” said Sene.

“Yes, they are.”

“That is quite typical,” said Solas. “Even I am afraid of Sene.”

“Shut up," she said.

Solas continued his smirking. “Did you know, Kieran, that Sene can skin an entire bear inside of one single hour?”

“No, I did not,” said Kieran. “That is quite an impressive feat.”

“When have you seen me skin a bear?” said Sene.

“Oh, come on,” said Solas. “Dozens of times. That’s what the Hinterlands are for.”

She blushed.

“It must be nice to be big,” said Kieran.

“You’ll be big someday,” said Solas. “Just wait and see. You’ll be big, just like your father was.”

“How do you know he was big?” said Kieran.

“I saw him in a dream once,” said Solas, chewing, carving. He tossed another carrot into the pot. “The Hero of Ferelden and his friend Alistair, lighting the beacon during the Battle of Ostagar.”

“I have heard that story,” said Kieran. “Thousands of times. It is one of mother’s favorites. I know King Alistair.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“Did you see my grandmother?” said Kieran. He was no longer peeling anything, just watching Sene and Solas, rapt. “She was there, was she not?”

Solas looked at Sene who did not look back. She was concentrating now on some sort of mystery vegetable. He thought maybe a squash. “In a manner of speaking,” he said. “Yes, she was there.”

“Solas has seen many things and been many places,” said Sene. She finally finished that mystery squash. She chopped it into eight neat little pieces and scooped them up with both hands. The left one still blinked green, crackled, fizzed. She no longer seemed to notice, or else she just didn’t care. Chopping vegetables—this was a small, physical act. For Sene, this kind of work was precious, productive, calming. He knew her well. “I’m sure he has many stories for you, Kieran.”

“Does Solas tell you stories, Inquisitor?” said Kieran. “Before you go to sleep at night?”

This made her smile. She tried holding it back, but there it was. She said nothing.

“I do,” said Solas, answering for her. “She tells me stories, too.”

“Of course,” said Kieran. “Dalish stories. I have not met many Dalish elves, but the ones I have met all tell wonderful stories. Which one is your favorite, Solas?”

“She has many Dalish stories ,” said Solas. “But you should ask her about her friend, the blacksmith of Ansburg. Those are my favorite stories.”

“A blacksmith?” said Kieran.

“Those are boring,” said Sene.

“Says who?” said Solas.

“They can’t compare.”

“To what?”

She shook her head. She was embarrassed. “Nevermind.”

He put his hand on her shoulder, big and firm. He made her look at him. “You’re being modest,” he said.

“I _am_ modest,” she said.

“Yes, I know." He ate another carrot. He smiled. “Hey, Kieran," he said.

“Yes?”

“If you could compare the Inquisitor to one vegetable, what would it be?”

Sene rolled her eyes.

“That is easy,” said Kieran, right away. “A beet.”

"A beet?" she said. She almost started laughing. All three of them, they laughed. She nudged Kieran with her elbow. “What kind of thing is that to say?”

“What is wrong with a beet?” said Kieran. “Beets are red, and they have long stalks. They are sweet.”

“He has a point,” said Solas.

“I am not sweet,” said Sene.

“Maybe not,” he said. “But you definitely have long stalks.”

“Hush.” She scooped up a handful of carrot shavings and dumped them, casually, into his lap. He picked up his arms, on instinct, but the pain swooped in and took him by the throat. It surprised him. He lost his breath and nearly folded in half.

“Solas?” said Sene. She put her hand between his shoulder blades. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

“It’s not your fault,” he said.

“You’re so broken,” she said, petting him, like a kitten.

“I’ve had worse,” he said. “You don’t need to pet me, Sene.”

“Yes, I do.”

Kieran was very concerned. “Should I fetch the healer?”

“No bother,” said Solas. “It is only pain.”

Then, Morrigan appeared. She stood in the doorway holding a red balloon, looking solemn.

“Mother,” said Kieran. He hopped off the table. She handed him the balloon.

“What is it?” said Sene. She knew. Something was wrong. "What's the matter?"

But Kieran was delighted and tugging at Morrigan's sweater. She got down on one knee. “We are going back to Skyhold,” she said.

“Now?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “It is not safe here, Kieran. Not anymore.”

“Morrigan,” said Solas.

“Is it the Magister?” said Kieran, so brave. Braver than any of them it seemed. Like a little knight.

Morrigan stood. She rumpled his hair. “Yes, Kieran,” she said. She looked at Solas, and then at Sene, and then at the anchor.

The air in the room became thick. It was heavy to breathe. The only thing you could hear were the faint cracklings of the magic from Sene's hand. Sene looked at it. “Shit.”

“You are certain?” said Solas.

“Leliana just returned with the news,” said Morrigan. “There is very little time. I assume that is what's activating your hand there, Inquisitor. Needless to say, you are needed in the war room, as soon as possible.”

“What about you?” said Sene. "We need you."

“I must take my son back to Skyhold,” she said. “Through the eluvian. I will return in time. You have my word.”

“I'm not ready,” said Sene, looking at Morrigan, then at Solas, then back to her hand. She looked at the pot of chopped vegetables. She was panicking. “I wish it were just dinner time,” she said. “I wish it were dinner.”

Solas formed his hand to her knee. “It will be okay, vhenan.”

"What?"

“I thought you should know, too,” said Morrigan, “as long as we're checking off all the details, that I asked Mythal to accompany me to Skyhold, seeing as she is completely helpless. But she keeps to the brig. She will not leave until you direct her, Sene.”

“Me?” said Sene. “Why me?”

“She is an apostate,” said Morrigan. “She has no power, no identity. She has pledged herself to the Inquisition for as long as she takes shape in this world. She has pledged herself to you. She’ll do whatever you say.”

“I can’t tell her what to do,” said Sene.

"Then she will do nothing."

“How much time do we have?” said Solas.

Morrigan held Kieran tightly to her side. He had drawn very quiet. He understood the ins and outs of duty. He held his balloon, and he waited. “A few hours,” said Morrigan. “At most.”

“Hours?” said Sene.

“We need to go,” said Solas. "Sene."

He looked better now, she thought. The carrots and the water. His color, it was better.

These small truths—they hurt like little branding irons, burning little stars and hearts into her lungs. It hurt to breathe, but they were better than the lies, she decided. All of it.

 

“We do not have the fortifications to take the fight to Corypheus,” said Cullen. “He chose this place for a reason. Half our troops are either still at Skyhold or scattered from the Hinterlands to the Western Approach. We wait it out. This is no worse than Haven, and at least here, we've got a fortress at our backs. We are far better off in the keep than out in the open where we'd not only have a Magister and his army to contend with but the weather as well.”

“In that case, how you do you suggest we organize our escape, Commander, should the fight prove to be too much?” said Leliana. “Do you suggest we simply lie down and die?”

“I certainly do not suggest that we _lie down and die_ ,” said Cullen, leaning with both hands on the war table. “Maker’s breath.”

“We can use the eluvian,” said Sene. All eyes on her. Sera was standing behind her now, staring at Solas and chewing the shit out of her fingernails. She’d been so relieved to see him, but her relief was immediately squashed by fear and now she could hardly sit still. Dorian stood beside Bull on the other side of the table, studying troop formations. Bull listened to the discussion intently. He’d had his great, hard hand on Dorian’s shoulder for a while, but once the talking started to get serious, he removed it, and now he turned around to face the wall, leaned against it with his horns, and breathed. “It’s here for a reason.”

Leliana was sitting in a chair in the corner of the room, dragging a whetstone down the length of an intimidating dagger, pure silverite. She was anything but cavalier. “What do you suggest, Inquisitor?”

"I'm not entirely sure." She looked at Solas. "I just, it must be worth something?"

He was stern, staring at the map on the table with his hands shoved in his pockets. “Sene is right,” he said. “These mirrors were built specifically for the purposes of extraction. Transportation is a byproduct.”

“But if we activate the eluvian, doesn’t that open us up to another attack?” said Cullen.

“By whom?” said Solas.

“By whom? We still have no idea who sent those assassins through to the kitchens. For all we know, it could be Corypheus himself.”

“That is not how it works, Commander.”

“Then please, Solas. Explain it to me. I have many specialties but magic mirrors are not exactly on the top of the list.”

“This is not about the mirror,” said Solas. “It is common sense. If the attempts on Sene’s life were, as you seem to suspect, the result of some organized conspiracy, then they have failed. Whoever was behind this will have retreated by now. They are licking their wounds. They would not attack again so soon, and certainly not using the same method of infiltration. Further, if, by some stretch of the imagination, they _are_ agents of Corypheus, then that is all they were. They came to survey. Foot soldiers who knew they stood no chance.”

“All of that is valid," said Cullen. "But it still does not allay my concerns, Solas. If we lose, Maker forbid, and that eluvian is active, then Corypheus has a direct route to Skyhold."

“I am aware of that,” said Solas, removing his hands from his pockets, studying the palms. “We cannot afford to leave any holes in our defenses. I agree. That said, the eluvian need not be left open during the entire duration of the fight. It can be activated only upon necessity.”

“And who, but Morrigan, can do that?” said Cullen. “She cannot be spared.”

“I can,” said Solas.

“You?”

He placed his hands back in his pockets. “If the fight goes south, I will retreat, with Sene. I have studied eluvians for many years. I understand their magic. Trust me, Commander.”

“I suppose I have no choice," said Cullen. "Very well. Solas, I will let you see to the necessity of retreat on your own. Sene, if at any time the battle tips out of our favor, you should be prepared to run."

“Wait,” said Sene, straightening up off the wall. “What?"

“We need contingencies,” said Solas.

“I get that,” she said. “But Solas, you're hurt."

“And?”

“And, you're _hurt_ ,” she said. She had her fists tucked inside her sleeves again. “Broken ribs, losing consciousness. You can't come. You’re not ready.”

“You need me.”

“You could die.”

“I will not die.”

“No,” she said. “I won't let you go.”

“Yes, you will.”

“Solas—”

He was shaking his head. The room had fallen to a tense kind of symmetry, with the hush and Leliana on her whetstone. Outside, it was starting to rain. You could hear the thunder. “Cracked ribs do not hinder motion, Isene," said Solas. "They only hurt, and they hurt like fuck, but you know that I am capable of compartmentalizing that pain.”

“You fainted in the crow’s nest. Twice.”

“I am fine,” he said. “You know it. And you also know that you are not going into this battle without me.”

“He’s right,” said Cullen.       

“Cullen,” said Sene. "Stay out of this."

“I do not mean to interfere on your personal matter,” he said. “But in the matter of life and death, we need him, Sene.”

“I can help,” said Dorian, looking up now, from the map. He was wearing a pair of wire-rimmed glasses that he sometimes used for reading in poor light. “Sene, I will fortify his barriers. I have been practicing, splitting my focus. I can do it. You can trust me.”

“Of course,” said Bull. “We'll all help. We’ve got your back, Boss. You _and_ Solas.”

“I can’t,” said Sene. “I can’t do it.”

"You’re all nutters,” said Sera then, close to tears. She took Sene’s hand. She directed her attention to Solas. “I get it Sene. But none of you. Elven man. All high and mighty, yeah?”

“I am not high and mighty, Sera,” he said. “You have to trust me.”

“You keep forgetting that people here care about you.”

“No, I do not.”

“Like it’s all just a bunch of duty. Blah blah fuckity blah. But that’s rubbish. If you die, I’m not forgiving you, Solas. Ever.”

“I accept that."

“And if we both die—”

“No one is dying.”

“ _If we both die,_ ” she said, “then I will find you in the Fade thingy."

"Sera—"

"I will find you, and I will punch you right in the Fade bits. It'll be balls in your eye sockets, and eye balls in the grass. Understand? Fuck me if I'm lying, Solas. I swear on the tits of Andraste. If you die, I will find you, and I will fuck you up. _Do you hear me?”_

At this point, Leliana was laughing. Her dagger hit the floor. “I am sorry,” she said, covering her mouth with her hand. “Balls in your eye sockets? The image. It is good, is it not?”

"Maker's breath," said Cullen.

“She seems serious, Solas,” said Bull. "You should really try not to die."

“Andraste preserve us all,” said Dorian.

“Nobody is going to die,” said Solas. He was staring at Sera, hard. Then, he looked at Sene. “Nobody is going to die. Do you understand?”

Sene was focused. She was pinched between her eyebrows, and her hair had gotten very big since the rain kicked up.

“Sene,” he said.

“Okay,” she said.

He sighed and closed his eyes.

“Then it’s settled,” said Cullen. “I’ve got men on the battlements keeping watch. According to Leliana's reports, Corypheus is traveling with an army of close to 100. Once he's spotted at a one-mile radius, Leliana’s agents will light a signal fire. My men will sound the alarm. That is when we will take position.”

“Signal fire?” said Sera. "When the fuck is that?"

Cullen looked around. The room, it was like a crop of statues. Everybody wanting to hold one another but it was all made of stone. “I have no idea,” said Cullen. “Not long. Your remaining time is your own. Just be ready."

 

They were ready. Or, they weren’t. But there’s no being ready for something like this, is there? While Sera sat and wrote letters to Dagna in furious chicken-scratch in the kitchens, Dorian and Bull sat down to play a game of Diamond Back in the parlor upstairs. Bull was trying to calm his shit, and this was the best way they knew how. They had invited Sene and Solas, but somehow, Sene and Solas had ended up in the armory, sitting on the floor in the company of a great many axes and swords and great, long knives and nothing else. Her bow was there, and her arrows, and his staff, leaning beside one another at the door. She sat staring at her hand as Solas braided her hair. He made careful work of it, tight and firm, though her hair was longer than it had been even a few months ago, and it took a considerable amount of concentration. Even still, he liked that it was growing. It reminded him that time was passing, and things were changing, including the two of them and even though it sort of made things feel even more unsolved than they were before, it was a comfort—to get older, to have her with him, getting older, too. He remembered Sera now, the last time they'd been in the Emprise du Lion, on Sene's birthday.  _Yeah, yeah,_ she'd said, kicking at the snow with her heavy boots. _It’s good, right? Getting older. Means you’re not dead yet._

At some point, he finally finished, and he gave her the hand mirror. She studied his handiwork and smiled, but she was nervous and she turned around, and she settled in and kissed him. It was so real and such a surprise that he nearly lost his balance. They were sitting next to a high, wooden table, and he leaned against it to brace himself. She was gentle with him, but there was conviction behind the kiss, and then she was in his lap, and then, they were staring at each other.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Do not be sorry,” he said.

She pressed her fingers lightly to the bandage beside his eyebrow. “How’s your head?” she said.

“Better,” he said.

She looked away.

“Sene,” he said.

“Yes?”

“I know things aren’t right,” he said. “Between us. I'm not pretending.”

“It’s okay.”

They heard something then, a mouse or something, scurrying from the room. They both turned to look, but it was gone. Outside, the rain was steady now. Nobody was sure yet whether this was an advantage or a disadvantage. In fact, it had not rained in the Emprise du Lion for several years. Far away, in the quarry, many of the villagers, as they sat, huddled beneath blankets in heavy, leather tents, had begun to wonder, even in the hour of their potential demise, whether this meant that the lake would finally thaw. This filled their fragile minds with both hope and despair.

Sene shifted on top of him, tucked her braided head into his shoulder. He put his arms all the way around her, could feel her sighing, closing her eyes.

“You smell good,” he said.

“Solas,” she whispered.

“Yes.”

"I'll let her stay,” said Sene. “Mythal.”

He put his head on her shoulder now. He had already begun to focus the pain elsewhere. All he could feel now was her. “Whatever you want.”

“You should tell her,” said Sene. “Not me. Before it’s too late.”

He picked up his head to look at her again. He said nothing. He realized then that a part of him had still not been convinced it was real. A part of him still thought it was a dream. It felt like a dream.

“It's your move, Solas,” said Sene. “I know you said no one was going to die today, but you can’t be sure of that. It's not enough that I know. You need to deal with this. With her. Because I can't...deal with her. She's here for you. It's your move.”

"Is this how I keep you?" he said. It was an honest question. He really wanted to know.

Looking at him then, she tried to figure out exactly what he was feeling. But she didn’t have that sort of talent. She could not decode Solas, not the way that he could decode her. She had to go on faith alone. But he was a desperate man, that much she could see, and he was her desperate man, but this did not seem to mean much anymore. There was so much to grapple with, so much beneath the surface. She was so light in comparison. So new. Unencumbered by years and years of tragedy and loss. That is what Mythal had said. That is what Mythal had meant. Sene wanted nothing more than to understand his pain, but she knew she couldn’t. It just wasn't in the cards.

She tried to remember the thing he’d said in the crow’s nest. The exact thing, about her. Something about saving others from themselves, or from forces that they, alone, could not battle. She still couldn’t really see it, what he meant. She felt stupid. She didn't want to be in charge of these things. And even with some psychotic Magister heading straight for her, trying to end the world, and she, alone, the key to his success or failure—she barely felt it, not beyond the immediate impulse of fight or flight. She was completely unprepared and just hurling through the atmosphere, straight into the sun a million miles per hour waiting for impact. But in the end, she just missed him. She missed Solas. She really did. She didn't care about the end of the world, she just cared about how, after of all this, mostly, she felt fucked, and she knew it couldn't last, and she had to put him to pasture. She had to put this whole thing to pasture, otherwise she would never know what she was actually worth. What she actually wanted. Half of the fight would be beating the bad guy. But that was mostly so she could get to the other half, the sharper half. The half where she had to start over, from the beginning. This was how she buried her love.

There was a commotion then, in the hallway outside. This broke the spell, and they both looked around. The alarm. It was just this great big musical noise. It sounded like smoke and heavenly birds. Some sort of horn or organ. Neither Sene nor Solas had never heard it before. They looked at each other. What time was it? Did anybody even know?

"Fuck," said Sene.

He took her hand.

Then, the Commander. He was standing in the doorway, looking at them with his hand on the hilt of his sword. Rain made shapes on the windows overhead. The room was lit with what seemed like hundreds of lanterns. Hundreds. Like a supernova.

"It is time," he said. "Inquisitor."


	41. When We Get Back to Skyhold, Pt. 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Buffy: I'm cookie dough. I'm not done baking. I'm not finished becoming who ever the hell it is I'm gonna turn out to be. I make it through this, and the next thing, and the next thing, and maybe one day, I turn around and realize I'm ready. I'm cookies. And then, you know, if I want someone to eat me—or enjoy warm, delicious, cookie me, then that's fine. That'll be then. When I'm done. 
> 
> - _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ , "Chosen"

_I. A Winter's Tale  
_

It wasn’t long then.

Mythal watched him put the hat on his head and lean against the lamp post on the corner of Wind and Winter. He so rarely wore hats, but it was cold outside. Typically, he liked hoods. He liked his face in shadow whenever he moved through the city. He wore a long, black jacket. He drank and he smoked wherever he went. It was the end of the world anyway, and who gives a shit. That afternoon, he dipped the joint and ground it to the sidewalk with the steel toe of his boot. He was a watchdog. He was keeping watch. They had been there since morning, walking up and down the avenues. Taking inventory and beating back the hounds. He placed his hands in his pockets, and he gave Mythal a long, careful look.

The city streets of Arlathan were dead everywhere. Loose leaves blowing in circles as the tree branches scraped. The people hid in their fox holes. Bare-faced, as Mythal had won this place with her army of Sentinels, and then Fen’Harel made it a sanctuary. Now, whenever the parade of evil arrived, he would snap his fingers and bring down the sky, in spikes. Pale, angry screeching. After a while, they mostly stopped coming. He was a powerful man, by virtue of blood, and living. It was his magic that had put those castles in the sky, floating over head, thousands of years ago. His was the kind of magic that built worlds, and this was both a danger and a promise. The eagles dove off the rooftops like savage beasts. The chain-link fences were rusted and peeling. Sometimes, when they arrived, children would come out to greet them in little clusters. He had whole armies of trained rebels living underground and floating sanctuaries where nobody could reach. Sorrow commanded the Sentinels from their compound in the Backwater by the sea, and another 800 still slept in the garden barracks of Mythal’s castle, the Blue Fortress of Arlathan, not far.

Solas’s old village in the Weathers outside the city had been burnt to the ground for many years. But sometimes, on nicer days than this, days when they had any time at all, they still went back there. They would hold hands and stand where his childhood home now lie dead in a pile of decade-old ashes, and they would gaze up at the tree that still grew from the garden, its root system like some massive, swimming tentacle creature. The roses were all gone now. And the thyme and the sand daisies. It was a hellscape. Solas was nearly thirty years old, and his mother had been dead for five years. In this world, other than his rebellion, his people—nameless and glittering generalities—Mythal was really all he had left to his name. She was the thing worth dying for.

That day in Arlathan, Mythal was standing up ahead of him in the middle of the empty, gray street in her dress made of gold, her brown hair pulled high and smooth off her face, her great blue sword dragging on the stone cobble behind her. “Come along, Fen’Harel,” she said. She was smiling. It was in jest, whenever she called him that. He smiled, too.

“Should we go home?” he said.

“For now,” she said. “The castle is safe, and the Well in the south is almost complete. I will return tomorrow to give Sorrow his instructions.”

"Very well."

The dust cleared then, and the city was in ashes. It was no longer beautiful, but it was still theirs. Together they found a mirror, and they went back to his hidden castle in the mountains. It was the only place they called home anymore. When they returned through the mirror and entered the bedroom, he threw his jacket to the bed and handed her his gloves. She held them for a moment before setting them on the mantle, leather and heavy and black, memorizing, weighing them in her hands like always, and then she went to where he stood beside a low, brass cart, muscled and tall and tired at the end of the day, pouring himself a glass of whiskey and her a glass of champagne. Outside, it was snowy and calm. Skyhold, before it was Skyhold, had been home only to them and to about 600 rebel troops who slept in the great, silver barracks downstairs. Where Solas and Mythal slept, it was high up in a tower that Solas would later remove in a fit of despair. He had painted the walls all around them out of boredom and frustration, cold frescoes of dreams he’d had about wolves and winter, recording their progress in pictures and keeping track of the territories they’d claimed off their enemies. It was a bad, bad way, and the elves were burning, but some would have said at the time that Fen’Harel, in all of his pride and circumstance, was winning.

That night, in the bedroom, Solas and Mythal touched glasses. They drank together. He lit a fire.

“What are your plans with Ghilan’nain?” she said, folded up like a little matchbook beside him on the couch. Her hair was down. She still remembered how it had felt back then, touching her bare shoulders.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “She’ll be here in the early evening.”

She sighed, wistful. She put her head on his shoulder. "I'll be scarce."

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“Have you ever dreamed of what it would be like to grow up in a castle?”

“No,” said Solas. He set down his whiskey. “Though I know you have often dreamed of what it would be like to grow up in a cottage.”

“Yes, I have.”

“We are different.”

“Your mother always said so.” She picked up his hand. He opened it and closed it in front of her. She would never forget this. What it looked like. How big it was compared to her own. “Once, she told me the story of how your father had come to her castle in the city to speak with her parents. They were not happy to see him, but they did allow him inside. He just stood very tall in the dining room. His head almost touched the light fixture. He had his hands in his pockets, she said, and he asked your grandparents politely to approve of their marriage. When they said no, he asked them again. When they said no a third time, he left, and he never returned. And she went with him. Your bravado, Solas. You get it from him.”

“That is more than they offered me,” said Solas. “After my father died, and we needed money, my grandparents would not even see me. I was escorted off the premises. I was fifteen.”

“Yes, well you were a reminder,” said Mythal. “You reminded them of what they lost when they lost her. A legacy. Of course, had your grandmother met you, she would not have been able to resist you. That is what you are to women, Solas. Perhaps she would still be alive today. A grandson must be something to live for. And she would be proud of what you have become.”

He smirked, but then he looked away. Something was broken inside him. She had her way of picking up the pieces, even if only for a little while. “Thank you, Mythal.”

“You’re welcome,” she said. “I'm tired."

“Me, too,” he said.

“I just wish we could love each other when the sun comes up.”

He looked at her. “Excuse me?”

“In the mornings,” she said, finishing her champagne. She handed him the glass, and he set it on the table. “And we could spend the whole day doing nothing but rolling in the weeds.”

“Now you’re being dreamy,” he said. “And impractical. Everything is relative, Mythal.”

“Maybe so. But in the mornings, we are no longer free, Solas. We are bound.”

“We have the nights,” he said.

“It is not enough,” she said.

“Are you dissatisfied, Mythal?”

“Sometimes.”

So he picked up his whiskey, finished it in one solid gulp. A new resolve. “I am going to undress you,” he said, putting his glass next to hers, “and then I will offer myself up to you on a very expensive platter. We will sleep all night and through the morning. We can stay here, at the fortress all the way into the afternoon if you like. It’s cold, but I’m sure there are weeds to be found, somewhere. If we look hard enough. How is that for the sun coming up?”

Mythal came apart. She felt like a ribbon in pieces. She laughed and disappeared inside his body. She did not remember how to exist any other way. He was like a window, and she was just the curtain. What is the point of a curtain without a window? There is none. You might as well be a table cloth, or a misshapen bed sheet. “You are the death of me, Solas.”

He pressed his chin to the top of her head. “I am much more than that.”

He removed and folded her nightgown into a neat little piece on the hope chest. He was meticulous. He had, after so many years together, become meticulous in the way that he handled her. Predictable, as if she were an algebraic problem that he had cracked long ago, and she liked it this way. She still felt fragile sometimes, her mind in many compartments, but with him, so deeply kept. She realized then, sort of late in her life, or at least later than she thought was probably appropriate for a woman of her standing and intelligence, that safety was all she had ever truly desired. But to achieve this, she'd had to learn that there are no kings, no knights in armor. Not in the way we imagine them at least—perfect and fully-formed examples of chivalry and code, created only to protect. That does not exist. There are only good men. In their time together, Solas had, at least, given her this much. That night, they made love in the bed, and afterward, he lit a joint. They passed it for a while and talked about bullshit. Once it had burnt out and the room was dark, they slept like rocks in the sheets. That was the last night they would ever spend together.

It was true that Solas and Mythal did not get to love each other in the mornings. That was true. The next day, she would return to meet Sorrow at her Blue Fortress in the city, and she would experience an ambush, and she would die. And over time, she and Solas and their souls and their hearts would disentangle string by string, as—let’s be honest—they probably would have anyway, but it was not actually this that tore her apart in the end. So, she had died. So what. Worse things had happened to better people. But during the era of their mutual desire, that she and Solas did not get to love each other in the mornings—that, to Mythal, would forever be the great blue tragedy of her life. That and, of course, the fact that, after everything, he had fallen in love with somebody else.

And now, she was alone in a dark place. A basement in a world that existed as a consequence of his power, and their love. She was alive, but it was confusing. Thinking of all this had her mind playing tricks on her, and it seemed to bring demons out of the woodwork. But everything was so real. There had been other elves there, too, with their long arms wrapped around their skinny bodies—servants and cooks—and they kept asking her for her name and occupation. They seemed to mean well, but she was far away and hidden, like a lighthouse. She loved them, but she was not one of them. These were Sene's people. “I am nobody,” she told them, very matter-of-fact, scratching at that itchy place on her arm. “I am nothing. Please do not ask.” And then there was a very loud noise from up above, like a ship crashing into the harbor and exploding, and everyone became very scared, and the light in the window was white, and the demons came.

But it was only winter again. In any case, she thought, as the world around her failed once more. And it was a wonder she had made it this far at all, on her own.

 

_II. Springtime Girl  
_

And as for Solas, it was no longer raining. But this was a ghost town.

At one point during the battle at Suledin Keep, Solas looked up, and he was sure he’d seen castles in the sky. It was Corypheus who’d done it. He was trash for a grandios display, and he had picked up pieces of the Keep—like spires and huge births of battlement—and he set them afloat in the air as an ostentatious means of diversion. They looked like castles to Solas. And he was so ragged and tired from fighting and splitting his focus to get the pain out of his body, he thought, for just a moment, that when he saw those castles, he was with Ghilan’nain. He remembered this time when they were nineteen years old, and they were together in this alley down off Winter Street in Arlathan, and she wore a blue ribbon in her hair, and the air was cold and wet like reptiles and earlier that day, Ghil had made some reptiles with her magic—birds from the feathers of one of her mother’s fancy hats, and it had been great fun to watch, but her mother had been pissed, and now, looking back, he supposed those must have been the good times. Childhood. They just smoked a lot of elfroot back then. He was always passing her the joint, and she had been pretty in this plain sort of way. But they were young, and you can never really tell what’s going to happen with a girl like that. A great beauty or nothing special. In either case, she was his only true friend, and yet, somehow, he was filled with indifference. He did not love her, but he did. He did not want her, but he did. It had been very confusing and general stupidity, as that is what it was to be young.

The castles floating over Arlathan had been abandoned long before he was born. Long before his father was born. For a thousand years, they’d been abandoned. They were in ruins, and most people said it had been the Old Gods who’d made them, but most people didn’t know shit. In any case, they were these wistful, haunted looking things now, built of glass and high, brick spires and lots of weird symbolism in the crosses and gargoyles that nobody knew how to read. Hard stone walls and colorful green windows and all of it overgrown in these strange, blue mosses that seemed to wink. Every once in a while, pieces from their dilapidated rooftops would fall off and crash into the city, crushing through somebody’s ceiling and killing a cat or worse. Such sad science. But predictable. There was no way to fix them and no way to tear them down. Those castles were dying. Those castles were what came to mind as the battle at Suledin Keep came to an end.

 _They give me nightmares_ , Ghil had said that night out on Winter Street. She was not a brave girl, but she was not typically fearful, and then he asked her something about the craps tables. They’d been hopping, casino to casino. He gambled a lot back then, especially whenever he was done getting beat to shit in the boxing ring. He was so bored. He was bored out of his fucking mind. What was he doing? He was just reaching, man. He was just reaching and reaching and trying to find something that took. A man like Solas, he needs a purpose.

Now he just remembered watching Ghil as she smoked that joint, the smoke escaping her lips and getting all tangled in her long, blond hair. They’d been friends since they were little but had only just become sexual creatures sometime maybe a month before. It was new, and he wasn’t exactly sure what to make of it. He could hardly remember now. He did remember, however, that they’d been friends for so long, it had sort of ruined them for romance, in a way. Part of him couldn’t get past it. But he loved her, because she loved him, and as we all know, Solas, despite his rugged and aloof exterior, was a sucker for love. He could not resist it. He liked to think he didn’t need it, but he did. Without love, he was an empty shell. A husk with no insides. This is why Sene was the one, because she was easy to love, and he just had so much to give. She had no capacity, no shape. She was this ball of energy that would just expand and grow, like a star, like the entire universe, and she gave to him so freely in return. Looking back, these other women, they were all so difficult. Bad timing and despair. Complications and more complications. Solas, despite what others might have thought about him, was just some kind of man. A man, in his essence, is a simple creature. He just wanted to love.

So, he had found her. But he was going to lose her. At some point, Morrigan had hit the wet pavement, hard. The sight was enough to bring him back to the present. She was unconscious, blood matting the black hair to her forehead. She always made him think of his mother and then Mythal—these dark-haired women he’d once loved and then lost in a bizarre haze of many-years grief that he now remembered, sort of. So he stumbled toward her, and he picked her up and dragged her into the shade of a high statue of the Dread Wolf, and he put the hair behind her bloodied ear and asked her politely to be okay. Do not die, Morrigan. Think of Kieran. Do not die. Pieces of the statue had come apart and crashed upward with the rest of the panoramic display. It was loud. He went then and he killed things. Lots of things. Some of them with his bare hands, and it was a swirling mass of red and anger and it must have been several hours of pausing, renewal, waiting as the storm clouds cleared and the enemy gathered his guard. And this went on until, at some point, he felt the Iron Bull shaking him hard by the shoulders and tilting his head up to the air. He saw things. It was over.

Sene had won.

Bull told him everybody was alive. Solas tripped over to Sene. The world got quiet and still. You could hear the wolves, lurking in the grounds outside the castle as the world around him slowly reassembled itself. She was on her hands and knees, heaving into the stone with her braids all fucked up, and there was blood on her face—just under her ear like she’d been knicked by a sharp blade or claw. She didn’t see him approach at first. She’d lost her bow, somewhere. It was gone, maybe flung to the wind, and she had a deep bruise on her wrist. He picked it up—her wrist, to make sure she was all right, and she opened her eyes to look at him as he pushed the hair back off her face. With her knuckles, he grazed the gash at her ear. It was still bleeding, but it was okay. She was okay. She started crying when she saw him. She looked around, and she began to panic.

“What the fuck?” said Sene.

“It is over.”

He could hear Sera crying somewhere, too. It was all a relief. Bull held her over there now, beside a topiary in the shape of an dragon. It had tipped over and the base shattered in the weeds, and Dorian had his head hanging between his knees, leaning into Bull and breathing, heavy, holding a bloodied cloth to his shoulder. There were soldiers everywhere, stumbling into place as the dust settled, and Morrigan was up now, too, stirring at the base of that statue, catching her breath, and then Cullen was there with her, doing what he did best as a man of duty, and he had a cut-up hand wrapped in a blue handkerchief, but he was telling her everything was going to be okay. They were alive. They had not needed the mirror. They were alive.

To Solas, it sounded like music. The clanking of armors as men moved through the field. There were no more castles in the sky. There was only daytime and clouds and the rainy winds of winter and the stupidity of the wolves outside. An aftermath. He held Sene. He could feel her body retching against his like she was getting rid of it all, all the bad shit, and he just let her. His eyelids were heavy, and he had to fight to keep awake. He was okay, but he was sapped, and he could feel the pain in his body creeping as his focus came apart, and it was sucking the life out of him, making it hard to breath. He pushed through. At one point during the fight, he remembered now, he’d hit the ground to duck a blow from the Magister himself, and this had aggravated his already cracked-to-shit ribs. But that was for later. Sene was bleeding and crying into his furs and so he guided them both to a sit, his legs splayed on either side of her, and he picked up her face, and he undid the small pack at his belt and withdrew a piece of a pale blue handkerchief. He held it to the gash beneath her ear in silence, and he smoothed her hair. She was overcome, and her freckled cheeks were wet, but after a moment she began to calm down. He cleaned up the wound and dressed it with a small bit of salve and a bandage he’d crafted out of nothing. Then, she put her head back on his chest and together they came undone.

 

_III. Friends of Summer  
_

Leliana was outside now. She was yelling to Cullen about progress within the castle, and about casualties. A lot, but nothing alarming. The dead, so far, were all soldiers. The civilians she could not yet account for. Demons had gotten inside. There had been no time for Morrigan to move so many people through the eluvian at once, and so the civilians, as well as the servants and the few refugees they had with them, had all been sealed into the brig. This included Mythal. It was quiet now, according to Leliana, but she needed men for a full sweep before she let them out, and to investigate for survivors.

She had her bow flung over her shoulder. She cleaned her dagger with a handkerchief and sheathed it. Her red hair was a rag doll mess, but she, herself, was unscathed. She came over to check on Sene, and when everything was all right, she looked around at the broken heaps and destruction, and she made a joke. Something about a naked woman lying on towel at the beach, or maybe it was a man. People laughed, but in the years to come, nobody would remember what the joke had been, exactly, or how she had told it, only that it had been the thing to break the tension and to remind them all that the world had not come to an end, and the Breach was closed, and that the great enemy of their lives, or at least the latest, and the thing that had served to unite them so many months ago, had finally been put to rest. She sent several agents immediately into the field to run the news to Skyhold, and she arranged for soldiers to return to the quarry and begin the process of repopulating Sahrnia. In a way, it was almost anti-climactic. This was it? This was the end? That’s what the joke had been about, of course. Something about the tides coming in. Or the chickens and their roosting. A naked man and the sea. All of that bullshit waiting, just so Sene could do the thing she was going to do all along, and win.

Very soon, all eight of them—Sene, Solas, Morrigan, Sera, Dorian, Bull, Cullen, and Leliana—slowly ascended the steps and gathered in one of the castle’s many cloisters. This one had endured less damage, and there were a great many soldiers here, comforting one another—healers and medics tending to broken bodies in the field. There were dead, and there were wounded. Cullen began to make the rounds, and he assigned several able-bodied men to head inside with Leliana, ad sweep the castle for survivors and anything leftover.

“Keep on your guard,” he’d said. “Once the castle is clear, release the civilians.”

When Solas and Sene got up to the cloister, they were leaning hard into one another, their boots scraping against the sopping, freezing earth, and that is when they noticed it—the orb. It was smashed into little pieces in a pile of discarded red balloon parts and sticky leaves and shattered rock near the center, sort of like a perfect little symbol of everything that had come to pass.

Sene’s body was still humming and on fire from the battle, but she could feel Solas, fluid and heavy and losing his grip at her side, being strong, because that is what he did, but she knew, that even for Solas, focus like this couldn’t last forever. He was, after everything, only a man. He needed to rest, and she wanted to let him. When they got to the orb, she looked up, and she tried to read his face, to understand what was going on inside, but there was nothing. It occurred to her then, in that moment, that the battle really was over, and she very suddenly did not know what to do next. Solas: just this ancient elf with an ancient pain and an ancient power, and he was sad and ragged, and he loved her. She still couldn’t figure out why, but there were worse things, she supposed, than the love of a man like that.

His face sort of softened as he let her go, and he took a few steps and dropped to his knees. He took off his gloves and stuffed them into his pocket, and he picked up the orb in its pieces. She got down by his side. She asked him if she could touch it, and he handed her one of the jagged little triangles without question. It was cold, and it just felt like metal. She knew, intuitively, that this was wrong. It had all of these lines swirling around, and she could see him thinking now, his jaw set, staring into the nothing of the broken thing in his hands.

“Can you fix it?” she said.

“No.”

“Is it my fault?” she said.

“Of course not,” he said.

She put her head on his shoulder. She didn’t know what else to say. The whole day had been a great axe coming to sever the future from the past. He set down the metal pieces then, and turned to her. She picked up her head to look at him, because she thought he was going to say something important. He looked profound and worried and stupid handsome especially given the circumstances, and so Sene just watched him, anxiously. He put the hair behind her ear. He was about to speak, but then, there was a loud interruption.

They heard a voice. “Bugger this.” It was Sera. She came between them, somehow, and plowed into Sene and held her fiercely. “We are _not dead._ Did you heard me, Quiz? Not. Dead.”

“You smell like lemons,” said Sene. “How do you still smell like lemons?”

“I squeeze it in my hair,” said Sera, yanking them apart and dragging Sene to her feet, and her face was wide and warm and red, and she was a little bit battered around the edges, but she seemed just fine. Like a parasol. “You should try it. A rush, it is.” She looked at Solas, who was still sitting on the ground. “Elven man.”

“Elven woman.”

" _Good one,_ you."

Suddenly, they were all there—everyone except Leliana. Dorian held out his hand to help Solas to his feet, his shoulder bandaged up good. “You and Sene look well,” he said. “Solas, how’s your brain?”

“Entirely fucked,” said Solas. “How’s yours?”

“Sheer perfection,” said Dorian. “So we have nothing in common, as usual.”

“I would like to make myself scarce,” said Morrigan, holding a hunk of cloth to her bloody head. “Your Iron Bull will not let me alone. He keeps trying to force healers on me as if I am some sort of invalid.”

“Lady, lady,” said Bull, huge as maples, cracking his knuckles. “You bashed your skull on a fucking frozen winter rock. You should have seen it go down. I mean you were a dragon, and then you weren’t, and then you bashed your fucking skull. It was—I mean it was awesome, let’s be honest. A fucking dragon? But it was bad. It was _real_ bad. We need to talk about this.”

“ _You_ may talk about it,” said Morrigan. “I, however, do not have time for such heroics.” She looked at Sene. “Your boyfriend, if I remember correctly, pulled me out of the line of fire. It seems that, after everything, chivalry is not dead.”

“Who said chivalry was dead?” said Cullen.

“I am not chivalrous,” said Solas. “Any good man would have done the same.”

“Modest shite,” said Sera. “Now. I need a drink and then probably another. I need thirty-seven drinks. Who’s with me?”

“We should debrief,” said Cullen, hands on his hips.

“Right,” said Sera, picking a dried leaf from her hair. “De-brief. Debrief your briefs, Cullen. Take them off and we’ll meet you in the kitchens. Stark naked.”

Cullen sighed. He glanced at Sene. “So, this is what it feels like,” he said.

“What?” she said.

“To win?”

She found this to be an odd sentiment. She realized she did not know the Commander at all. “Yes,” she said, and she smiled. She looked around. She looked at Solas. “Let’s go home.”

“Home it is,” said Cullen.

 

_IV. Don't Fall  
_

_Home is where your hat is._ That is what some people say, but Sene didn't really get this. She was an uneasy spirit and she was the kind of girl who needed to go and go, and so she did not typically wear hats. Her hair was too big, and they flew off her head in a hurry. If she did not have a home, some weight to which she could tie herself down, she ran the risk of just floating away. She was not your average Dalish girl. She preferred anvils. She preferred the moon. She preferred Solas. Still. Wet and hard and happy. And tall. Can a man be your home? Can you live inside of a man? Can he be your walls and your roof and the hearth in the sitting room? Can he be your window? Maybe.

As Cullen began to negotiate their exit with a few big men and a woman lieutenant, there was a commotion over on the steps leading out of the cloister and to the great, castle door. Everybody turned to see. The castle door of Suledin was made of solid iron, painted red, and it needed no less than four men to haul it open.

"What the hell is that?" said Bull, wrapping his hand with a linen strip. He and Dorian were over by an upturned cart. It had once belonged to a merchant of pumpkins and squash, but now it was abandoned.

"Not sure," said Dorian. "Civilians?"

Sera sighed. "More shit, yeah?"

Coming outside then was Leliana, and in her wake were about fifteen soldiers and an entire gaggle of elven servants, most of them frightened, and yes, there were civilians, plus some sort of struggle happening in the back. It was unclear as to what, exactly, was going on. But Leliana broke away and approached Cullen. “We have a slight situation, Commander.”

“What now?”

“A breach,” she said, pushing back her hood. “Demons got into the brig during the battle. Three dead soldiers. One of the elves has seemingly lost her mind.”

“One of the elves,” said Sene. She had been listening. Everybody else sort of fell away. She saw one of the cooks from the day before, the elven girl, standing off to the side of the other civilians, bleeding from her arm, but it did not look life-threatening. She was very scared. Sene approached her.

“What happened?” she said.

“She didn’t want to leave,” said the cook. “She didn’t kill no soldiers. She saved us. She killed the demons. Those soldiers forced her to leave.”

"She saved you?"

The scuffle then, it was loud, coming toward them, a woman’s voice, a small, cold creature. Emerging now, were two Inquisition soldiers dragging Mythal into the daylight. She was crying and struggling against them. Sene felt her breath catch. Meanwhile, Solas had come up and stood beside her. He watched, carefully, and then he slowly began to make his way up the steps toward the castle door. He looked worried, but he seemed to know exactly what was going on. So Sene followed him, but she kept her distance, because she was not sure what to expect, and this whole thing felt like some great and apocalyptic seismic shift. There were mountains in their future.

When he got to the top of the steps, he stopped, and he watched the struggle with his hands in his pockets, very stern. Sene made a move to stop the men, but Solas held her by the elbow.

"Wait," he said. “Let me handle it, vhenan.” He was very calm.

The soldiers, they were arguing now. The first wanted to let Mythal go, but the second was convinced she was crazy. “She’s psychotic,” he said. “You saw what she did to those demons. She’ll kill us all.”

"No she won't," cried the elven cook. "She just didn't want to leave."

Sene watched then as Solas closed his eyes. In all of their arrogance, those soldiers had left an opening. They were young and moronic, and Mythal was a little thing but apparently battle-born, and she put her boot into the second man’s gut, and she disarmed him. Easy. She took his sword and tipped the blade to his throat and drove him to his knees with very cold eyes. It happened very fast, and in that moment, Sene could hear the metallic surge of thirty weapons leaving their sheathes.

There was nothing but silence blowing in the wind.

Mythal was covered in blood. Sene could see it now. It was in her hair. It was on her hands and in the creases of her neck. Her gold dress. She looked like she had been through a massacre. The other civilians were coming up now, too, to watch, shouting in support of her innocence, and a few of the other soldiers were trying to keep order. At first, Sene was filled with sympathy and sadness, anger as she watched this happen. Mythal looked like a victim, but it was more complicated than that. There was a reason that Dalish elves tattooed this woman’s markings on their faces thousands of years beyond her reign. Goddess or not, she was something to behold. She was a usurper. Sene understood this perfectly. In fact, she had never understood anything so perfectly in her entire life.

Meanwhile, Solas rolled up his sleeves, and he spat to the stone. He rolled his head around his great, armored shoulders. He was gathering his focus. It was a wonder Mythal had not seen him coming, and yet, there was also an expertise at work. He seemed to know exactly what to do. It was desperately romantic, but it was tragic and oddly private. As if they were all looking in on something they were not supposed to see. He moved in, and he reached silently around from behind her. He was so much taller, his arms long and careful, it was easy, and he gently took her wrist into his hand.

Sene waited for the backlash, but the moment he touched her, Mythal closed her eyes, and she dropped the sword. Just like that. The soldier at her feet lurched onto his hands and knees and coughed, gasping for breath. Sene backed away, she gestured to Cullen who barked an order. All the men in their midst lowered their weapons and stood down. It was as simple as that.

Mythal turned around. She barely came up to Solas's shoulders in height, and she looked at him as if she did not believe that he was real. She then started to cry, briefly, and passed out against his body in a whoosh of gold patchwork silks and crinoline. He caught her, though Sene could see him straining. Two broken ribs nearly took him to his knees. He shook out his head, and he took a deep breath through his nose, and without further hesitation, he swept her up into his arms. The sound he made as he did this—it was animal, ripping through the pain, and agony, just to hear him. Sene hated that he was in so much pain. It was so strange, to see him weakened. Mythal’s gold dress gathered against him. He turned around. He looked at Sene.

 _It is done._ That is what he would have said, if he were not so far away. Solas.

 

_V. Seasons of Love_

A little later, as they were getting ready to leave, Sene stood with Sera outside the gate. You could hear that third dragon, still out there somewhere. Beckoning with its big, mean jaws of change. The weather was cruel in the Emprise du Lion, an enemy all its own, and it was cold outside, especially after a winter rainstorm like that. Everybody could see their breath, escaping in the dead of the early evening, but they were dry. They planned to ride into midnight and sleep out there on the road beneath the stars. They didn't care. They were tired, but they were in a hurry. Bull helped Solas settle Mythal into one of the carriages up ahead. One hundred soldiers on horseback all around them. She still had not woken completely. She seemed to be in and out, and Sene half-wondered if this was Solas's doing, if he had hidden her in the Fade to ease such stark transitions of living. They had discussed using the eluvian to transport themselves back, but apparently it was a complicated measure that, with even just a few of them, required a great deal of magic. Morrigan and Solas were both injured and sapped from the fight. And in any case, like in most situations, Sene preferred the old fashioned way.

“Who is that woman?” said Sera, finally, referring to Mythal. She had on her pink, knit mittens again, given to her by Morrigan.

“They know each other,” said Sene. Solas was coming toward them now. Bull had gone off to find Dorian back near the stables. “It's a long story.”

“Yeah, well. I'm not the mood anyway," said Sera. Sene thought she was probably lying, but there would be time, later. Lots of time. They both understood this. "I want to get gone."

Then, Cullen. Of course. He had been nearby. "Inquisitor."

"Yes."

“Leliana has offered to stay behind to close things up and bring the region back to order. Is that all right?"

"Of course."

"We are ready to leave when you are. We just need a few more minutes to saddle up our remaining men and put the carriages into motion.”

“I'm ready,” said Sene.

“Home,” said Sera, taking Sene’s hand, tracing the knuckles with her thumb. “If we go real fast, we can be there in like, what? A day? And then we can have a party. With bells. _Real_ bells. Or, maybe not real bells. Don’t think Skyhold has real bells. Not like that big one, in Crestwood. So we can do fake bells. Solas can bring them again, like before. Don’t matter. As long as there's bells. And us. And home."

Solas approached. He looked pale and exhausted. Sene did not know what else to say, so she asked him if he would be able to stay upright on a horse.

He gave her a look. "Of course, vhenan. What do I look like to you?"

"Sort of like a puppy." Sene shrugged. "To be honest."

Sera laughed. "Woof."

"I am not a puppy," said Solas, trying to smirk. But he seemed to tired, even for that. "I am a man. I do not require your pity."

She pushed the gross, red hair out of her face. She felt dirty and tired but overcome with relief. She just took his hand. "It's not pity," she said.

"Then what is it, Inquisitor?"

"Love, you git," said Sera.

You git.

 

Once, a long time ago, when they had first returned from the Temple of Mythal, Sene had asked Morrigan whether she could see into Solas’s past. _I_ _see only darkness,_ Morrigan had said. _Sleep. There is sadness, but 'tis not something I am able to comprehend._

And for a long time, this was the truth. It had often seemed to Sene as if Solas's life, before her, had not existed at all. It was just darkness. Like he had been invented, just for her. This tall, perfect, beautiful man who loved her and taught her things and made her butterflies, and he protected her. He made her feel safe, and so she wanted to protect him in return. Before the fight, Sene had felt sure that a part of what they’d once had was over. This was scary, but she sort of got it now, watching Solas back there in the cloister as he had picked up a piece of his past and carried it away and put it in a carriage, painfully, and now, here he was. With her. It was something important, but it needed to be dealt with. His life was bigger than her, just like her life was, in its own way, bigger than him. They existed not just together, but in and out of and past one another, and, for a while, they’d just caught. Tight. Two fish hooks in time, and it had been golden and beautiful, and nothing else seemed to matter but the two of them. But things happened, and the world and all of its catastrophe had shaken them apart, and it was forcing them now to take inventory of everything they’d gone blind to before. The beginning, the end. They couldn't live like this forever. They were not fish hooks. They were people. Sene was a person.

But this was complicated. Before Solas, no one had ever called Sene _lethal’lan_ before. She had always been _da'len._ Always. To her parents, her Keeper. Before Solas, it didn’t matter that she was nineteen years old or a skilled huntress and a provider for her very important Dalish clan in the Free Marches. She had always been called and considered and treated like a child. If there was one thing Sene hated, this was it. Nineteen is no great feat of adulthood, but that is not a child either. And Solas had known this. He called her _lethal'lan._ From the very beginning. _The sky is falling, lethal'lan._ She was his kin, his equal. It woke her the fuck up. Solas had been the agent, the thing to bring her consciously into adulthood. And if you count the fact that they then became lovers, and that he was her first lover, and not just the casual kind, but the serious, true, life-shattering, fuck-me-up in the desert kind, he had been the one to bring her into womanhood as well. She had no idea what this meant. If it was bad or good. Of course it must have been okay, but for the time being, she was confused. She could no longer tell the difference between what, in the span of almost a year, she had learned on her own, and what he had taught her, and this worried her. It made her nervous. How could she trust her instincts, if she did not know where hers ended and his began?

But this was all too much for now, Sene decided. She didn't feel like dealing. She'd just won the war. These were her friends, and this was her life, and she would figure out how to live it later. Or maybe as she went along. Because she was just Sene. So she hugged Sera again before they got on their horses to head back home—two tall girl elves covered in the carnage and the seasons and the remains of the day. Young and stupid lucky. They were going to have a party. Everything smelled like lemons as Sene thought to herself, _I’ll just figure it out later. I'll figure it out when we get back to Skyhold._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thank you for reading!! Stay tuned. <3 -g


	42. When We Get Back to Skyhold, Pt. 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The road home.

_1\. Lovers_

In a tent on the other side of the fire, there were Sene and Solas. Solas was on his back in nothing but a pair of linen slacks and an undershirt, his eyes closed and hands folded together, knees in the air. He was chewing on a piece of bark or something. Sene was leaning against her pack, her hair down and washed, carving a little duck from a hunk of wood. She had not done this in a long time—not really since Haven. She had lost her touch, but she could feel it returning, slowly, as she whittled away at the beak. Dorian had brought them a lantern, good for both light and warmth. It sat on the mat beside her. Solas was too sapped even for butterflies. He could hardly move. They sat in relative silence for a very long time. Outside, the men were filing in and out of dinner. Sera and Dorian were over trading stories by the fire, fluctuating between argument and debate, some bizarre form of bonding as Bull sat with Mythal in one of the carriages nearby. The world was filled with quiet and distant animals like wolves or some other kind of winter creature that dared not venture too close to camp. There were men everywhere. Sene was eager to get back to Skyhold, but in some ways, she was eager for this as well—this in-between place. It was the backward nomad in her, the Dalish girl always searching for a nest in the wild, a place to call her own.

She looked at Solas, watched him carefully, closely. She was sort of watching him breathe there, but he was not sleeping, and she knew he wasn’t sleeping, and he seemed to know she was watching him anyway, as he always did, so she sighed.

“Vhenan,” he said after a while.

“Yes?”

“You do not have to watch me. I am not going to disappear.”

“I don’t think you’re going to disappear.”

He peaked at her out of one eye. “Then what is it?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I was just bored. It’s not always something, Solas. Sometimes it’s just nothing.”

He opened both eyes now, turned his head to look at her, curious. “What are you making? I haven’t seen you do that in a while.”

She looked down at the little half-finished piece. “A duck,” she said.

“A duck?”

“Yes. What’s wrong with a duck?”

“Nothing is nothing wrong with a duck.” He smiled and closed his eyes. “Will you let me paint it when we get back to Skyhold?”

The idea had not crossed her mind, but for whatever reason, it made her blush. “Of course,” she said.

“My father used to sculpt animals from wood, just like that,” he said. “He was very good.”

Sene set the duck away, and the knife. She brushed the wood shavings off her lap. She laid down on her side, so she could be closer to him as he spoke about his father. “What else was he good at?”

“Lots of things,” said Solas. “He was a clockmaker. He used to build my mother these strange lamps made of glass. He once built her a music box.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“What was his name?” said Sene.

There was hair in her face. He put it behind her ear. “Marin,” he said.

“Marin,” said Sene. “What does that mean?”

“It is a simple name,” he said. “The language of it upholds, even now. It means exactly what it sounds like. Break it apart.”

“Marin,” she said. “ _Mar’in._ Your house?”

He nodded.

“What was he like?” she said. “Do you remember?”

“He was tall,” said Solas. “Like me, maybe taller. He was popular. People liked him. He could get along with anyone."

"Like you," said Sene.

Solas smiled. This seemed to flatter him. "Perhaps. Most of this I know secondhand, mind you. From what my mother told me. I only knew him as a father, not as a man.”

“Mythal said he built her a dollhouse.”

“He did,” said Solas. “He built her many dollhouses. She probably just forgot.”

“She knew him?”

“Yes, she did. He worked on her family’s castle for many years. He designed and built their belfry when I was maybe two or three years old. Mythal would have been a girl, about nine.”

Sene became nervous. She could tell now that there would be no more secrets between them. This, in some ways, was scary. “Mythal knows so much about you,” she said. “She knew your parents. She was a part of your whole life. I’ll never have that.”

“You already do, vhenan,” he said. He turned toward her, on his good side. He breathed in and then out through the pain and he shook his head. “How can I convince you of that?”

“It's okay,” said Sene.

"No, it is not."

She reached for his hand. She studied his knuckles. She traced her thumb over the white scribbly scars. “Before you, and before all of this, my life was so simple and stupid.”

“You're losing perspective," said Solas. "You did important work. You have always done important work, Isene.”

“Maybe,” said Sene. “Either way, for you, it seems like the complete opposite. I wish I knew you.”

“You do know me.”

“No. From before,” she said.

“My life before?”

“Yes. When you were Fen’Harel.”

He sighed then, away into the sky. He laid down his head then and closed his eyes, and he seemed very tired. Big and far away now. Like a satellite. “It was only a nickname," he said. "Nobody called me that who knew me. I have always been Solas. But I will tell you anything, Sene. You've only to ask.”

“It hurts you. I feel like I’m hurting you to ask.”

“I am capable of remembering the past without reliving it, Sene," he said. He was a little brusque, a display. "That was not always true, but now, it is.”

She touched his face with the palm of her hand. “What did you do all day?” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what did you do all day? The Dread Wolf is not real. Fine. I just—then what _was_ real?”

He softened then, leather beneath her touch. He kissed her on the forehead. It was careful and comforting and mild and a reassurance, like he was okay with this. Like really okay. She turned around in his arms so that he could press against her and nestle his face into the back of her hair. “You want little things,” he said. “You like the little things. Like ducks.”

“Yes," said Sene. "I do."

“Okay, vhenan,” he said. “Where shall I begin?”

“How did you spend your time?" she said. "When you weren’t…working. Or doing whatever it was you did for Mythal. What did you do?”

“I drank,” he said. “I played a lot of cards.”

“In Arlathan?”

“Yes. The city did not fall until I was twenty-five. My mother and I were taken in by Mythal when I was nineteen. It was dangerous in the meantime, but it was still a living creature.”

“What else did you do?”

“My mother had a garden in Mythal’s castle," he said. "I spent a lot of time there, painting. Whatever bullshit came to mind. I smoked incessantly.”

“Smoked what?”

“Elfroot,” he said. “It was how I managed. We are similar."

"Apparently," she said. "I never really knew."

"I did a lot for Mythal, Sene," said Solas. "I was her bodyguard. I was her negotiator. I was her General, eventually. I went to her parties, and I ingratiated myself with her people, and her world. This was demanded of me from very early on.”

“Her world. You mean like, nobility?”

“Yes, Sene." He kissed her scalp. She could feel it there, a whisper. It made her warm. "They were a violent group people, not unlike Empress Celene and the rest of those we encountered at the Winter Palace. Beautiful birds and well-dressed. Portraits of wealth and importance. It was high society to a most repulsive degree. But they were ruthless and uncivilized and violent. We lived with Mythal in her castle in the city for many years, under her protection. It was called the Blue Fortress.”

“The Blue Fortress,” said Sene. “Was it actually blue?”

He smiled into her hair. “Yes. It was.”

“Was it like the Winter Palace?”

“It was much bigger than the Winter Palace," said Solas. "Its highest spires rose past the clouds. She had a whole room just for birds, and another just for butterflies and another just for dollhouses—all of them built by my father. She had a garden built on one of the rooftops just for my mother. The two of them were great friends.”

This interested Sene. It was surprising. “Really?”

“Yes, said Solas, "and after long days, they would take long walks on the river paths. Just the two of them. And they would talk.”

“That’s good,” said Sene. “Right?”

“I believe it was. My mother never had many friends, not after my father died.”

“What about you?” said Sene.

“What about me?”

“Your friends. Other than Mythal.”

He drew heavily around her, drowsy. He took a deep breath, and he exhaled, tugging on her shoulder a little so that she turned around to face him. When she did, he put the hair behind her ear. “I had only one friend, Sene," he said, quiet. "There were acquaintances, of course. But only one real friend. She was taken away from me, again and again, and in a multitude of ways. Overtime, we fell apart.” He closed his eyes. He took a very deep and heavy breath as if what he was about to say was of great importance. "Her name was Ghilan'nain. And before you ask, Sene, yes, she was the same Ghilan’nain that you celebrate every year at your Dalish Dance of the Halla, and yes, it was her blue hair ribbon that you found in my jacket pocket in the Fade. She was not nobility, nor was she a goddess. She was just like me. We were born nobodies, powerful, and therefore raised beyond our status in a time of war. Her mother was a wedding planner. Her father was a blacksmith. We grew up together, and on the day that Andruil started the Great War, we were both nineteen years old. Twenty men came to my house, and they burnt it to the ground, and they took my mother, and they took Ghil and her entire family. They beat me to a pulp, on Andruil’s orders, and they left me for dead. But I did not die. I went to Mythal, my village destroyed, and that is when _Fen’Harel_ became more than just a nickname. Mythal had my mother forcibly removed from Andruil’s compound on the east side of the city after that—creating a tension with Andruil that would never fully come free. But she could not access Ghil. Ghil was too valuable, an _asset_ like I was _,_ and she was under heavy protection, and so I did not see her again for over a year. I didn’t know if she was alive or dead. My best friend, usurped into the servitude of a psychopath. So I just smoked, Sene. And I drank, and I did my job. That is how I spent my time. Over time, Mythal became—more. There were moments when it seemed luxurious, my life with her. Everything was expensive—the whiskey, the silk. But it was not luxurious. My mother was ill, and everything—it was work, Sene. Hard, sad work. With no breaks. Like the butt of an axe grinding my body to dust. And this was just in the beginning.”

Outside the tent, you could hear the weird winter crickets. They were breathing the world wide open, and the mean bears and the wolves and their snarling in the distance. Everything seemed vulnerable. But it was too cold for crickets living under the earth, Sene thought. Wasn’t it? She felt the resignation radiating off of her lover in desperate waves. He had his eyes closed. He seemed a thousand years younger than he had before he’d told her all this, and she couldn’t explain it, but it was true. He didn’t reach for her. He didn’t cry or complain. A part of him had turned off and she thought, _of course it has._ She understood not thinking and that part of your life where you just up and vanish, and this was a similar mechanism. Mythal had said they were alike in some ways, and now Sene knew this was true. Before, she never thought she could actually be _like Solas._ He was the grand master of everything he touched, including her, and she was only just now realizing how distant this could make him seem, and how she had sort of liked this at first. Polished up, on a pedestal. A perfect man.

But he was not. He was not perfect, and some part of him was still a boy and he was just grasping for love and legitimacy. She traced her thumb over his eyebrow, and then she kissed the little scar there. This made him shift and react and hold her close like a big animal, and this was reassuring. The gash from when he’d hit his head during the dragon fight in the Emprise du Lion was healing now, and it would scar, too. His knuckles were scarred. There were more scars, little things on his chest and his back. Nicks and deep scratches and flesh wounds from nobody knows when, probably not even him. And this was only the outside. She wanted to pet his whole brain.

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you, too,” he said.

“We can go to sleep now. Maybe we should.”

He shook his head. “No, Sene,” he said. “I have slept enough.”

“Then do you wanna get high with me?” she said.

He opened his eyes. Gray, metal, surprised. “What?”

Sene smiled. “Sera has a bunch of elfroot,” she said. “She bought it off one of the scouts before we left the Keep. She’s smoking it with Dorian right now.”

He yanked her on the hair, playful. She shoved him. He smirked. “You want me to get high with you?”

“What, are you too old?” she said. “You’re like thirty, right?”

“I guess,” he said. “Or, I thought I was. I know I told you I was thirty in the Temple. But I think I might have actually been thirty-one by then. I think I might be thirty-two, Sene. I have lost track.”

“Thirty- _two_?” said Sene.

“Yes. Is that a problem?”

“You tell me. I mean, it is pretty old.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Excuse me?”

“Come on, Solas,” she said.

He held her face so he could get a better look at her. She was smiling. She was showing him her teeth. “Thank you,” he said.

“For what?”

“For being you. For nothing at all.”

“Oh,” she said. “Anytime, Solas.”

Sene and Solas were lying together on the floor of a leather tent in the freezing mountains, a tent in which they’d consummated their love what seemed like thousands of times, and now they were just facing each other, taking inventory of Sene’s insecurities and Solas’s fucked up past. But the crickets were imaginary, she believed. Maybe it would take some time, but they were gonna bring each other to life.

 

_2\. Strangers_

Meanwhile, the Iron Bull was sitting in the back of the carriage, looking after Mythal as she slept. They’d stopped a few hours back to set up camp in a deep valley of the Frostbacks. She came in and out of sleep at strange intervals, but she never really seemed to see him. She was so small she almost disappeared into the blankets, but at least she was clean now. Solas had used a wet towel to wipe the carnage out of her hair and off her face and hands, and a couple of the girl servants who had been with her in the brig had managed to help her into a new dress. She did not like men touching her. That is what Solas had said, but as long as they operated on a code of earnestness and truth, she would listen to them.

Solas was exhausted. It was why Bull was here in the first place. Because after some tense negotiation with Sene, he had crapped out and finally agreed to just shut the fuck up and follow her their tent. The two of them together were like some sort of crazy fucking weather system, thought Bull, in constant conversion and sort of reckless motion, but every once in a while, they would find themselves inside a moment of stillness, and they’d rest. It was mesmerizing, and he loved them as if they were a part of his own great meaty heart, but he sort of wished Solas would listen to her more. That man had a little too much pride. In this way, he was sort of like Dorian. But you got to bite that shit back, thought Bull. You got to admit that sometimes, it’s somebody else who knows what’s best for you.

As Mythal slept and the moon came up, Bull sat reading a book—a big book. It was huge, something about Tevinter history, given to him by Solas. He’d asked for it himself. He wanted to know more about Dorian and the nuances of where he was coming from, as he could sort of sense this growing vulnerability in the man, and this was something that, given Dorian’s guarded sensibility, he wanted to take advantage of. Especially now, now that it seemed like they had accomplished some great big task and were on there way to a clear respite. To be honest, Bull had never really thought himself a man much for monogamy, but at some point, he had become one. He wanted to spend his respite with Dorian. It was difficult to acknowledge at times, and yet he found himself day after day unwilling to quell the effect it had on him. These were _feelings._ Feelings were good. They were sort of like pie, or killing shit. And at the end of the day, sort of like pie or killing shit, the Iron Bull was actually quite good at _feelings_. He wanted to help Dorian to become the same.

At some point, Mythal finally came awake. Fully. She looked around with her huge, black eyes, and at first, when she saw Bull, she stiffened. She became very still and afraid, an instinct he could tell had been nursing inside her for some time. So he held out his hands, a surrender.

“Easy,” said Bull, and he closed the book in front of him. “Easy. I know I seem like a stranger, but I'm a friend.”

She stared at him for a moment, in confusion. She was pretty—probably stunning in some other life in which she wasn’t quite so ragged and her edges burnt to shit. Her straight brown hair was tied back with a piece of twine. She looked both a great deal younger and older than him all at once, which was strange and almost metaphysical in presentation. She sort of glittered. And yet as she sat there, coming to some sort of realization, and she looked down at her hands, she also just seemed like a woman. A very typical woman. A pretty and very typical elven woman.

“You are Solas’s friend,” she said.

“Yeah, that’s me,” said Bull. “Friends with Solas. He’s finally trying to catch some rest. I think. You doing okay?”

“Am I doing okay?” she said, looking up at him.

“Yeah,” said Bull. “You had kind of a bad break back there, with those Inquisition guys. They weren’t trying to be assholes, I don’t think. But I’d get it if you were still pissed.”

“I’m not pissed,” she said. “I suppose I am fine, all things considered. Thank you for asking.”

“Anytime.”

They both sat there for a moment, looking at their hands until Bull became antsy. He settled in, leaning his great, wide back against a pillow and crossing his legs in front of him. He was probably too big for this thing. He felt it creaking beneath his weight.

“So,” he said eventually, trying to make conversation. “I hear you slaughtered like, six or seven demons in the brig.”

“Excuse me?”

“Yeah. Killed them with a sword, all by yourself, right? Nice.”

“It was not nice,” said Mythal.

“Maybe not,” said Bull. “But you saved all those elves. They’re definitely thankful, and I think the Boss was pretty impressed as well.”

“The Boss,” said Mythal. “That is Sene.”

“That’s Sene.”

“She was impressed?”

“Definitely. Sene is always way more impressed by what fighters can do with their hands than with their magic. She is interesting to have in charge. She tends to favor warriors in the field.”

“I understand that.”

“Yeah, I bet you do,” said Bull, shifting around a little. “So you know Solas pretty well, huh?”

She looked away.

“Look, lady,” he said. “What’s your name again?”

“Mythal.”

“Mythal…Mythal? Isn’t that the name of one of those Dalish gods?”

“Yes.”

“Right,” said Bulls. “Right. Anyway. Good. Mythal. Look. I’m not an idiot.”

“Do people typically think you’re an idiot?”

“Of course not,” he said, scratching his horns. “Or, well, yeah. Actually. Sometimes, they do. But trust me when I say that works to my advantage. In any case, that's not the point."

"What is the point?"

"The point is, I can always tell when there’s something going on…beneath the surface. And from what I’ve seen, and I’m not saying it’s my business, but from what I’ve seen, you seem to be…an ex. Of some sort.”

“An _ex_?”

“Yeah. Of Solas.”

“I don’t understand.”

“An ex-girlfriend. Ex-lover. Ex-wife. Hell, I don’t know. I don’t know much about Solas’s past. I don’t even know how old he is.”

Mythal mulled it over in her mind, folding her hands into her skirts. “It is winter,” she said. “What month?”

“Uh, Firstfall, toward the end I think.”

“Then he would be thirty-two.”

“Thirty-two,” said Bull. “Nice.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m twenty-eight,” said Bull.

“And your lover,” said Mythal. “The handsome man with the mustache. How old is he?”

“Dorian’s about a year older than I am,” said Bull.

“And Sene, she is twenty.”

“Something like that.”

“Thank you.”

“You got it,” said Bull. “So what’s it gonna be?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Are you his ex or what? Come on. You can talk to me, Mythal. I’m a big guy, but I’m soft. Like cookie dough.”

This made her blush. "Cookie dough?" She seemed to trust him. She played with the hem on her dress now. “An ex," she said. "Yes, well, I suppose that is exactly what I am. An ex, of sorts.”

“Yeah. I knew it.”

“How did you know it?”

“Because. The way he knew what to do up there, how to deal with the situation. I could tell there was a…history. If you know what I mean. Plus, you’ve got kind of this crazy thing going on. It’s this kind of look in your eye, like you’re right on the edge. Like a hidden power. Seems like he’s into that. He's the same way, and Sene, too. Maybe it's the whole _elf_ thing. Don't ask me.”

“Sene is not crazy.”

“Have you ever seen her with a bow, on the battlefield?”

“No, but I saw her back her head into an assassin. I also saw her disarm a man who was a great deal bigger than she was.”

“Well, then you get the idea. She is no delicate flower.”

“I’m still not certain I get it,” said Mythal. “But then again, it doesn’t matter much at this point, does it?”

“What about you?” he said.

“What about me?”

“Where the hell did a little thing like you learn to use a sword like that?”

“Like what?”

“Killing demons,” said Bull. “Disarming men twice your size. That’s some serious shit. I thought you were supposed to be an apostate.”

“Magic was put to waste where I am from,” she said. “I’ve lost most of mine by now. But I grew up with the sword. I had many teachers. You don’t forget how to use it.”

“I hear that," said Bull. "Hey, maybe when we get back to Skyhold, if you’re feeling better, you can show me a thing or two. We can…trade techniques. But only if you want.”

“Skyhold?”

“That’s where we’re headed.”

“Of course,” she said. Outside, she could hear the people at the fire. They were happy. It irritated her briefly, but only because she knew she could not be a part of it. This was wrong. So she shook it out of her little bird head and then she looked at Bull. “What’s your name?” she said.

“The Iron Bull,” said Bull. “But you can just call me Bull.”

“Bull,” she said. “You are a good man.”

“Thanks, Mythal.”

“And are you serious? About the sword?”

“Hell yeah,” said Bull. “What do you say? You can show me your stuff.”

She smiled, in spite of herself. “Okay,” she said. “When we get there, we shall see.”

“Awesome,” said Bull, resisting the urge to clap his hand to her shoulder. It’s what he would have done to any man or woman. But he remembered what Solas had said. So instead, he reached into the pack at his side. He kept a couple things in there—ingredients and what have you. Things he used to make his salves on the road. Some of them were purple flowers. He couldn’t remember what they were called, he'd been using them for so long. He took one, and he sniffed it. It smelled okay. He gave it to her.

“What’s this for?” she said, holding it, delicate, in her clean, small hands.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Like you said, I’m a nice guy. And you seem kind of fancy. Like maybe you like flowers.”

“I do. Thank you.”

“See? I’m already smarter than I look.”

She brought the flower to her nose. “Is there anything to eat where we are?” she said, looking around. “I’m sorry to bother you.”

“It’s not a problem. I’ll get you something.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I will wait here.”

“You know, you don’t have to stay here,” said Bull with his hand on the carriage door. “If you’re feeling up to it, you can leave the carriage. Take a stroll. I mean, it’s fucking freezing, but if you’re feeling cooped up, we’ll be here till morning.”

She looked down at the flower, twirled it between her fingers and shook her head. “That’s okay,” she said. “I’d just like to stay scarce, for now.”

“I get it,” said Bull. "And I'll be back."

She smiled. It smelled like lavender, and ribbons. The outdoors.

 

_3\. Friends_

Morrigan had abandoned the fire a little while back. She was not tired, but there had been a great deal of smoke, and wine, and Sera and Dorian, while in no way insufferable, had grown rather raucous. She wanted quiet. Her head still hurt from the fight, and she was getting around about as well as Solas, and she needed to rest, though she could not find it in her mind to do so. Still, since Mythal had manifested, Morrigan’s regular headaches had stopped. She had not really found time to give this too much thought, though she figured they must have been some sort of consequence of the Veil, like a complicating barrier that no longer factored in. Solas would know.

She was not a religious woman by any stretch, but Morrigan could not help but find the significance of his identity truly fascinating. Fen’Harel. Dalish folklore taught him as a trickster, a conman, and while yes, perhaps he did embody certain predilections toward playful scheming, he was no villain. He was a savior, a rebel. Or at the very least, he was just a powerful man, caught up in circumstances he could not control, and consistently falling in love with women whose status outmatched his own and yet who required his particular strength and knowledge for protection. It was a compelling pattern. He was, truly, a masterful guard dog in his life’s work. Positioned dutifully at the foot of his queen, and yet, in both circumstances, particularly in that of his relationship with Mythal, he routinely outshone her. Charming, intelligent, effective on the battlefield in more ways than one. A strategist with a unique and hefty power that, in legend, raised him to godhood. And yet he was so typical of men in so many boring ways. Territorial and aggressive, controlling and arrogant. But all at once, a boy who desired the nuturing hand of a woman above all.  

Morrigan had only ever loved once, and it had not been for a very long time. She had been young, barely two years older than Sene when she became pregnant with Kieran and lost his father to what she now knew as the bullshit scourge of duty and sacrifice. How she hated it, and this was not the life she wanted. Matthew had been no god, but he was like Solas in that he had been similarly charming and territorial with Morrigan during their relationship, and as a clueless virgin to whom men had previously been a game of cat and mouse, she’d put up a marvelous front. She dealt with him and for a time even had him convinced that she was far more experienced and worldly than she actually was. She put him in his place. She had seen Sene “deal” with Solas in similar ways, and though they were her own, they were familiar. Sene was brash and honest where Morrigan had been measured and boastful, but it was all just a means of tricking arrogant men into showing their vulnerabilities.

But there was a difference, too, and it was huge. Matthew had been twenty-three, barely older than Morrigan, and a boy in his own right when all of the great tragedy of their lives took place. But Sene was a twenty-year-old Dalish girl grappling single-handedly with a man who, in emotional and physical years had already entered his thirties, and in completion, was an ancient being who had lived in various forms for thousands of years. This was astonishing. How did he love? What did that mean? She remembered what she’d told Sene many months ago in the garden at Skyhold after having just drunk from the Well of Sorrows—that his love was _aggressive._ She knew now, of course, that it could exist no other way. A man like that, with all those demons—if he was going to love, it was going to be the true and deep fucked-up kind that never died. It would be immortal and god-like in its own right.

Morrigan was worried. Sene, despite her bravado and her skill on the battlefield, was young and inescure in her status. In many ways, she was just a girl and terribly alone. She had no one but Solas and more men, and then of course Sera, but Sera was her own kind of child. She wondered now what Sene would do. Run off and marry the Dread Wolf whose ex-lovers included not one but two members of the Dalish pantheon? She could not foresee this, not for a while at least, and so she knew that heartbreak hovered like a ghost.

Morrigan had too few attachments those days. It was like a seed in her heart. She was hungry. She missed Kieran and it was making her wobbly. She sat now beside a frozen river with her gloved hand on the ice, and she tried to picture a life in which she had made a friend. A true friend. She’d had some contact with Alistair in recent years, and he had always loved Kieran, but that was not a man in the market for _friendship._ They had made their peace together long ago over the loss of Matthew, to whom Alistair had been a dear friend, but in the end, he was too clever for his own good, and he was married, and a king, and whatever the hell that meant to him, she had no idea, but to her, it was like a distant trial that she did not want to overcome. So maybe she could be friends with Sene. She thought about it, whether it was even possible to plan these things or forge them or if they needed to grow on their own, but they had already been through a great deal together, and Sene was easy to be around, and Morrigan felt an immense affection for the girl, and—though she was younger—a kind of intense bond, too, over the fact they were both brash and aggressive creatures who seemed to be drawn to the same kind of charming and assertive men. Men of honor, men of code, men of sacrifice and smirking sadness and loss.

The entire Inquisition, in fact, seemed ripe territory for friendship. She wondered to what lengths she could go. Would she ever leave? Would she go back to the Winter Palace? She had earned her independence at this point, by sanction of the Inquisition and as long as it existed, she was in no danger, per her apostate status. But just as Mythal had said back in the brig of Suledin Keep— _Nothing lasts forever, Morrigan._ It was a terrifying prospect now, for some reason—that of facing the world with her child, alone.

That is when the Commander approached. He wore simple clothes and a great warm parka made of wool, and draped over his arm was a pretty blanket, stitched together from various hides and all of them dyed different colors in a rich palette—burgundies and rich blues and forest greens.

“I thought you could use this,” he said, showing her the blanket. She stood to meet him. She wore a long, black cloak that swept along the earth at her feet. Snow was falling now, just these little dry flakes going around like dandelion in the moonlight.

“That is very thoughtful, Commander,” she said. She took the blanket, easy and admired its quality. “And this is a beautiful textile. Where did you come by it?”

“It was given to me by my sister,” said Cullen. “Some time ago. I'll need it back, of course.”

Morrigan smiled. “Of course.”

“How are you feeling?”

“I am fine,” she said. “I am tired.”

“I imagine you are eager to get back to Kieran.”

“Indeed.”

“Well,” he said. “I just thought—you looked like you could use a little warmth. I have plenty to spare.”

“Do you, Commander?" She smiled.

He rumpled his hair with one big hand then, and he looked around sort of awkwardly. “Right,” he said. “Well, you keep that for as long as you’d like.”

“I will do that,” she said, nodding, genuine now. “I thank you.”

“Anytime,” he said, and then he sort of blushed.

Back by the fire, they heard laughter.

“Was that Solas?” said Cullen, looking over his shoulder.

"I believe so."

"Have you heard him laugh before? He is quite a serious man."

"I have heard him laugh," said Morrigan. "Many times. Things are different on the battlefield, Commander. He is looser. Relaxed. It suits him."

"Well, that makes sense."

"In any case," said Morrigan. "They all seem to have gotten into the elfroot by now.”

“Elfroot?” said Cullen. “Maker’s Breath.”

“I’ve never tried it myself,” said Morrigan.

"No?"

“Growing up, my mother was a bit of a control freak," she said. "She was distrustful of your world. Men in particular. Suspicious to a stark degree. I never even had a sip of alcohol until I met Kieran’s father when I was twenty-two years old.”

“Warden Matthew Cousland,” said Cullen, serious now. “Yes, I know the tales very well. I did not realize however, for quite some time, that he was Kieran’s father. Leave it to me to miss such an important detail as that.”

“'Tis of little importance,” said Morrigan. “Not many people know, other than those I have come to befriend here. The Inquisitor herself did not know I had a son until we returned from Crestwood. She has been very patient, and very kind with us.”

“I must second that,” said Cullen. “Without her, I’m little more than a stray.”

“Will you be joining them," she said, "at the fire?"

“No, I don’t think so,” said Cullen. “I typically prefer to give the warriors their space. Plus, I haven’t smoked or had even a drop of alcohol myself in more than a year. What with—well, you know, Lady Morrigan. It is important for me to stay in control these days. I don’t have a lot of room for…error.”

“I understand,” said Morrigan. “You needn't explain. And it is just Morrigan. The _Lady_ part I reserve strictly for my noble usurpers at the Winter Palace.”

Cullen sort of laughed at this, low and unexpected. He was more clever than he seemed. “Do you have plans to return?” he said. "To the Palace? Morrigan."

“No,” said Morrigan. “Not in the least. I will serve out my duty to Sene, as long as she’ll have me, and then, well. We shall see.”

“Yes, I hear that,” said Cullen. "We shall see."

There they stood by the moonlit frozen river, Morrigan holding Cullen’s sister’s heavy, beautiful quilt.

“Well, I’m going to have a walk around camp,” said Cullen. “Stay sharp, nudge my men, make sure they're not sleeping on the job. You are free to join me, if you’d like.”

She gave him a careful look, narrowed eyes. He was a man of stature well enough, the Templar. Former, of course, but this was still somewhat of a blind spot for Morrigan. She knew Alistair, but she was used to Wardens. A pure Templar was a different animal. This particular animal was a gentleman, it seemed, and reformed in many ways, and fuzzy, and despite the stories, Morrigan certainly did not fear him. She did not make habits of judging those before she knew them, not really. Cullen was kind, if not a little clumsy—these bizarre gestures of chivalry toward her. She did not know what to make of this. Did he like her? It was silly and certainly inappropriate, she thought. She was not ready for that. Not in the least. But he knew Matthew's name, and he was terribly gentle about it. And apparently she, Morrigan, was still able to appreciate the gallantry of a tall and handsome man such as this one, no matter how out of practice she'd got, and this small reassurance, in and of itself, was warmth enough.

She glanced down at the blanket, and then back to the frozen river. Sera was laughing now, loudly, and Sene, too. If she listened closely, Morrigan thought she could hear the sounds of crickets hiding in the winter brush. But that was impossible. She heard Dorian and Solas, trading magical debate. She could smell the drugs on the wind. The last she’d heard, the Iron Bull was with Mythal. He had volunteered for this. He was very good with strangers, thought Morrigan. Sensitive, bright. All of them working together, as friends.

So she did it. She took a walk with her fellow advisor along the bank of the frozen river. Why not? She wanted a friend, and he kept his hands in his pockets the whole time. She’d wrapped the quilt around her shoulders. They discussed their lives and stupid nothings of the past as the snow fell all around and in between.


	43. Conversations at the End of the World

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Angel: You still my girl?  
> Buffy: Always.
> 
> - _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ , "Enemies"

Their last night in the mountains, they’d got high. They wandered away from camp and into a snowy cave all by themselves, and they put down a blanket, and it looked like somebody had made a fire in there some weeks before, so Sene rekindled it while Solas rolled up more of the elfroot, and then he put some butterflies up into the air, and they leaned against each other and passed the joint and went flying away to the stars. Together. There was a skylight overhead, and it was a wonderful shelter, this place, and it had been a long time since they just acted like animals. Solas could hold a lot of smoke, and he blew it out in careful rings and dazzled her with tricks from a deck of cards he sometimes kept in his pocket. He said it felt like the beginning. _The beginning of what,_ said Sene as he played with her hair. _The beginning of time_. They slept in a pile in the very back corner of the cave, restless though nestled hard together beneath several heavy blankets. They did not have sex, even though they both wanted to. They, of course, loved each other, but love, just like anything else, is complex and breathing, a living organism.

It must adapt if it is to survive.

 

Skyhold. It was dawn. A clean, pink morning with snowflakes melting on the glass. They had returned the night before to a quiet bank of lassitude. Everyone was asleep aside from Cole who waved quietly from a moonlit battlement overhead. Their arrival had otherwise been a secret, a usual request from Sene who did not relish grand displays or fanfares, and so the news would spread quickly that morning, at the behest of Josie and then Sera through her feelers amongst the servants, and by lunch, everyone would know. Sene wanted to be able to go down to the Main Hall rested and fully aware and meet her onlookers with pride. She needed distance and all her demons tucked away into a drawer. There had been so many demons. Like spikes. Her body burned.

Solas was still asleep. He had slept hard that night, finally home, flung to the sheets, such a sturdy, tall creature to be so broken. Handsome, breathing quiet, shirtless, and bruised. He still couldn’t manage any other position but flat on his back and would do little to let the healers treat his pain. A man of his own invention, he did not like to be kept by anyone but her, and even then, she had to work for it. She loved him so much and yet there was an ache, deep inside, and she wanted to know him but the learning curve was steep—she needed more time. For a while it had seemed like all she needed to know was the stuff she already had right in front of her, and in a way, this is what Abelas had said out on that ledge in Crestwood. _A man is his heart, Isene._ It was romantic, she thought, and it made Abelas seem romantic and maybe a little more naïve than she’d initially expected. But it was not entirely true.

There had always been that darkness humming around the edges and deep inside of Solas, and she thought now maybe she was finally beginning to see where it came from. He had lost too much in the way of time and people, and he was not a normal man. She understood now the death of that spirit of Wisdom all the way back in the Exalted Planes. According to him, she had been one of the very few friends he’d gathered while dreaming in the Fade, and while it had been far from romantic, in the end, what did it matter? Everybody Solas had ever cared about had died. It was no wonder that, after Wisdom, he had disappeared for weeks and then finally returned to her, ragged and out out of recourse, his knuckles bloodied and his body bruised, ready to be taken and possessed. It was no wonder he he became so controlling and sleepless after she had almost died in the Emprise du Lion, and it was no wonder why he would not even entertain letting her fight without him in the final push to end Corypheus. It was no wonder. No wonder. No wonder.

On the journey home, before and after their pretty night in that cave, Solas had grown newly positive, but she knew that this was just him embracing and controlling the chaos. It’s what he was used to. Deep down, he was still weary. She knew. He no longer talked of their future or what might come after, and instead he only talked about his past. She could see it in his eyes whenever he spoke about his mother and her black hair and cold hands that the pain was still raw and unprocessed thousands of years later, and she could not bring herself to ask him what happened, or how she had died. He did not mention Ghilan’nain again. This, too, seemed unprocessed, though in some other way, and though she trusted him, Sene was still uneasy about his relationship with Mythal. She still did not understand the gravity that it once possessed, and Mythal was _here_. Her presence in general seemed to hamper Solas’s sense of time and space in the wilderness. He was getting lost, and this worried Sene, and he still had not gone to speak with her since they returned to Skyhold, not really. Whenever he looked at Sene, he smiled, bright and wide open, because yes, she genuinely made him happy, but this was also a careful mask. She knew it well by now—its edges and contours. Like he was trying to convince himself of something.

She wanted to fix him, but she was finally beginning to realize what an impossible feat this would be. So she stopped trying. There was nothing she could do but listen, and she sometimes felt that even this—her very presence in his life—was making it worse. He was rushing. To be with her, to be all right so that he could be with her. He didn’t trust that she would wait for him. He never had. That’s why he lied. Every moment of every day, he was prepared to lose her, and there was nothing she could do to convince him otherwise. It was a natural state for Solas— _losing._ This was so fucked up that Sene didn’t even know where to begin.

Solas carried so much inside, and everything was infected with heartbreak and the past. Could he be salvaged? What did that mean? Was he a shipwreck? Was he in ruins? What made him so different from Mythal? With the mind and body in such stark contrast with one another that, after all these years, some modicum of insanity was inevitable. Was it just Sene? Was it because Mythal had died, and what did that even mean? Sene was confused. She was afraid that he wanted too much, stuff she didn’t yet know how to give. She was terrified of losing him, because Sene had never really lost anything. Not really. And it was clouding her judgment and, again, messing up her sense of self, and who she thought she was, and she could not talk to him or explain what was going on, because he had all this really serious shit to deal with. Even though she knew he’d understand. But it was never just understanding with Solas. He would sacrifice the entirety of his happiness for hers in a single heartbeat, and this was not something that she could allow.

Meanwhile, that morning, Sene was up early, standing out on the freezing balcony with a blanket over her shoulders and a letter in her hand. The letter was from her mother and had arrived only a few days before, and while the writing was not desperate nor was it colored with any sort of sadness or despair, it seemed that there was news, and it was not good. Samuel Hart, Sene’s friend and beloved blacksmith of Ansburg, had died about three weeks back. Word of his passing had come for her, specifically, at her clan’s compound in the outskirts of the city, but the courier had been coy and her Keeper had threatened to have him arrested, so he promptly left without return.

Her father did not want her told or bothered, but her mother was a sensitive spirit and thought she needed to know, and for this, Sene was grateful. _It is unclear as to why his family sent for you, Isene,_ said the letter, _a brazen act, if you ask me. But it seems that the blacksmith has left you something important. The matter, according to his daughter, is apparently of some urgency, though I hope you will not dismiss your duties on her behalf alone. I did not know this man. But if you are in his last will and testament, then it is apparent that you did, perhaps better than I had previously understood, and this makes me worry. Come home, da’assan. We miss you. But only if you can._

Solas came outside at some point and looked around. She saw him before he saw her, and she hid her face and she both secretly hoped that he would just go away and also needed him desperately. He stood very tall with his hands in his pockets, and then he got down and sat next to her on the freezing cold stone. He picked up her chin and saw that she had been crying. He looked rested, for once, and she wanted this to be enough.

“What’s going on?” he said.

“Nothing.”

“Sene.”

She gave him the letter. There was nothing else to do. He took it without question, and he looked at her, and then he read it, slowly, start to finish, with caution, one hand on his jaw. When he finished, he sighed, and he folded it into a triangle. They were silent for a long time, listening to the wind and the wolves as they scraped along the mountain paths below. Somewhere downstairs, there was a party in the works, and they could not hear it but they both knew it was there. They had never in their lives been so thankful for the privacy of a tower like this one, where time could stretch on forever and ever.

“I’m sorry, vhenan,” said Solas eventually.

“Thank you.”

“Your mother—the letter doesn’t say what happened,” he said. “Does that bother you?”

“No,” said Sene. “There was always something. With him, I mean.”

"Was he ill?”

“Maybe. I never knew the whole truth.”

“Do you know what it is?” he said. “That he might have left you?”

“I have no idea,” said Sene. She wiped the cold tears off her cheeks with the back of her hand. “I really don’t. He didn’t have much.”

“I used to be full of advice for difficult moments like this,” said Solas, holding her hand now, studying her knuckles. “Perhaps you remember. In the Winter Palace, for example. Out on that balcony. I was a vision.” He smiled. “It seems now that I have been sapped of my wisdom.”

“I’m okay.”

“I know,” he said. “Just tell me what I can do.”

“Nothing,” she said. “There’s nothing you can do, Solas. It’s just a shock.”

“When will you leave?” he said.

She looked at him. “What?”

“For Ansburg?” he said, tucking the hair behind her ear. “You are going, aren’t you? The matter seems urgent.”

“Of course,” said Sene. “I just—I don’t know.” He smelled good, she thought. Like a man, like morning. She looked up at the sky and thought maybe she could hear the stars and their secrets, but they were on the other side of the planet by now. She could chase them forever and never learn anything at all.

“When is the last time you heard from her?” he said. “Your mother.”

“I wrote to her a month ago, so maybe almost two?”

“How is everything?” he said. “Otherwise. Other than the blacksmith.”

“It’s the same,” she said. “I sort of told her about you—nothing specific. She never responded.”

He smiled, but it was very quiet. “What did you tell her?”

“Just that you’re tall,” said Sene. “For an elf. And that you’re a man.”

“A tall elven man. That is very nonspecific, yes.”

“I know,” she said. “I know. But it’s impossible, Solas. My family and I don’t…communicate very well. Or at all. Obviously. My father didn’t even want my mother to send me this letter.”

“I understand. I was only kidding, Sene.”

“And they are very provincial. Like wolves.” She looked at him. “No offense.”

“I realize.”

“And you are not Dalish.”

“Yes.” He sighed. “I am quite aware of the fact that I am not Dalish.”

“I really don’t know what they would think of you, Solas,” said Sene. “I just thought we’d have more time.”

“Time for what?”

She sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m sorry, Solas. I’m just so exhausted. After everything. Corypheus. Was that even real?”

“Yes, it was.”

“I can’t even get my head around it.”

“Has the anchor changed at all?”

“No,” said Sene, holding out her hand between them, flexing her fingers. “It’s still here. And on top of everything, it’s like, I have this great big truth, right here, in you. Who you are. What you know. But I can’t tell anyone. It’s a secret. It has to be a secret, right?”

“I’m not sure.”

“The Dread Wolf,” she said. “And everything else about our fucked up history. It makes more sense than anything, what Mythal told me in the brig, and yet—it is not what I was raised to believe. No one is going to believe us, and maybe they shouldn’t.”

“But you felt this way in Crestwood,” said Solas. “Even before that. Did you not?”

“I know,” said Sene. “Since the Temple. But I was blinded back then. I thought we could make something out of it, the two of us. We have all this stupid power. The Inquisition. Remember our pilgrimage? Seems so cheap now. Beause I didn’t know the whole truth. Now, I do. And I just feel like, before we even think about any of that, so much more has to come first.”

“Like what?”

“Like us, Solas.”

She could see him swallowing, hard, as he stared out through the slotted rail of the balcony. His jaw, flexed. “Are you still angry,” he said. 

“No,” she said. “I’m not angry.”

“Tell me the truth.”

“I am telling you the truth. I’m just confused. I don’t know what to do.”

He began to dig into his eyeballs with his fists then, and once they started to squeak, she nudged him out of habit. He dropped his hands and exhaled, and he looked at her.

“What?” she said.

“This is a complicated situation. For a multitude of reasons.”

“Yes.”

“I understand your confusion. And yet, oddly enough, I am somehow reassured that there was a time in our relationship when I was youthful enough in my naivete to believe that love was enough.”

“Solas,” said Sene. “Love _is_ enough. It just can’t be the only thing. Right?”

He hung his head and shook it out, like a dog.

“Right?” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

“What do we do?”

“I don’t know,” said Solas. “At some point, it seems that you became the wiser one between us. Perhaps you should decide.”

“You’re still the wise one,” she said, waving him off. “You’re just having a bad couple of weeks.”

This made him laugh. He seemed to almost go crazy from it. “ _Ara vhenan,_ ” he said after a little while. “I love you, Isene. I am sorry about your blacksmith. I have always loved your stories about him.”

“I know,” she said, her eyes still feeling a little puffy. “It’s okay, Solas. I love you, too.”

He kissed her, hard on the forehead. He put his arm around her and held her tight against the chilly sunlight. And she realized that for a moment, she had already forgotten. About the blacksmith, about home. She was that fast, but now, it was dark again, and scary. Like being dropped from a ten story building without warning. The story of Sene.

“Are you ready?” he said. “For what is waiting downstairs?”

“No,” said Sene. “You know I’m never ready for stuff like that.”

“And yet you always do just fine.”

She tucked her head into his shoulder and, for just one moment more, let the wilds of their secret life consume her.

 

Sene had an easy time in the Main Hall, of course. Just like Solas had said. It was not a party yet, just a sort of welcome, and a lot of cheering, but the space was very loud, and very crowded. There was some food put out on expensive platters, being tended by the same elven servants as usual, but this was mostly per convenience. The real party would be that night, and it would be some kind of serious affair. Josie had big plans for the two of them as they stood together, beside the throne.

“We’ll need to get you properly coiffed,” she said, straightening Solas’s collar.

He removed her hand, gave her a look. The room was filled with people—soldiers and civilians, servants and Orlesians—most of whom had given up their attention by now and gone back to admiring the scenery or discussing the current state of affairs, per the Divine, while chewing on biscuits.

“How do you even coif Solas?” said Sene, observing. “He has no hair.”

Solas smiled. “I believe she means properly _dressed,_ vhenan.”

“Indeed,” said Josie.

“Oh,” said Sene. “Will I be _coiffed_ as well?”

“But of course,” said Josie. “With immaculate care.”

“Do I have to wear a dress?”

“Only if you’d like to.”

She looked at Solas, but he had his hands in his pockets and one of her hairpins between his teeth. He was staring far away and past all the people and out the door. He was somewhere else, thinking. He’d used to get this way a lot in the very beginning, when they were friends. Like he was trying to remember something. Like his mind was gone from his body. 

“Solas?” she said.

“Yes, vhenan,” he said.

“You don’t have to stick around.”

He looked at her then, came to. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, go do whatever you want. I’ll see you tonight.”

This seemed to worry him. But then Josie reached around his waist with a piece of measuring tape, trying to be clandestine about it. It didn’t work.

“Excuse me?” he said, raising his arms out of instinct. Of course, the pain took him by the throat. He folded in half and swore so loudly that three separate nobles from three separate families each turned around to make sure he was okay.

“Andraste’s kindness,” said Josie. “Forgive me, Solas. I forgot about your…injury.”

“It is no bother,” he grunted.

Sene pet him on the back of the neck. “He has two broken ribs,” she said.

“And yet you fought Corypheus? That _is_ impressive.”

“It was nothing,” said Solas.

“Well, in that case,” said Josie, surveying the two of them, “Sene, we should parade you around a tad more this afternoon, before it is time to get you ready for the party of course.”

“What do you mean _parade_ me?” said Sene.

“Typical fanfare,” said Josie, checking something off on her clipboard. “Nothing you have not encountered before. There are several diplomats here from Val Royeaux who have only just arrived. They all wish to meet the Herald of Andraste.”

Sene sighed. Solas had straightened up by now, slowly, and glanced around. But he seemed irritated all of a sudden, as if he had only just now noticed all the visitors and their grasping presence in Skyhold. “Are there people in my rotunda?” he said.

“Who would be in your rotunda?” said Sene.

“You know,” he said. “ _Diplomats._ ”

Sene laughed at this.

“There had better not be,” said Josie. “I’ve had guards posted at every entrance. Though many have asked about your frescoes, Solas.”

“They are very pretty,” said Sene.

“They are not _pretty,_ ” said Solas as somebody pushed past him from behind. He glared, and then he looked at Sene. “Are you sure you don’t need me?”

“Very sure.”

“Then that is where I will be.”

“Painting?”

“Perhaps.”

“How can you paint if you can’t lift your arms over your head?”

“You do not need to know." He smirked. “Unless you’re my nurse.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Andraste preserve us all,” said Josie.

But Solas was doing that focus thing now, where it felt like he was reading her mind, and Sene could tell that he was only making sure that she would be okay, and then his smile faded completely, and he became serious. “You should tell Josephine,” he said. “About your blacksmith.”

“What blacksmith?” said Josie.

Miles and miles, thought Sene. Like an arrow. She nodded, low.

“I’ll see you tonight,” said Solas, still staring, hard. His eyes could be like steel hooks sometimes, and she could not separate. But then, like the good, tall man that he was, he shoved his hands in his pockets, and she watched as he turned around and carefully made his way through the crowd. He nodded idly as he went, casual, at this person and that, and then he disappeared. And Sene was left with Josephine and her room full of admirers, and a piece of her heart way up high on a string.

“He is an elegant man, is he not?” said Josie.

She did not know how right she was.

 

“She has been separated,” said Cole. He was standing in the doorway to the rotunda, hatless, in a pale blue gold shirt, attempting to reason with one of the guards there. “She has been separated and then put back into place. Like a puzzle in matter. You must let her be.”

But the guard was just scratching his head. “Lady Ambassador said no one in the rotunda, except Ser Solas.”

“She knows all the secrets,” said Cole. “Her heart rested here long before your boots, and Solas would not mind.”

“Prove it,” said the guard.

Solas approached then, hands still in his pockets. He was still chewing that hairpin, but it was just a bit of wire by now. “What seems to be the trouble?” he said. 

The guard straightened up immediately, at attention. He was tall, but Solas had him by at least three inches. “Ser Solas,” he said.

“Please spare me the useless title,” he said. “It is just Solas. Or _sir,_ if you absolutely must.”

“Very well, sir.”

“Solas,” said Cole, smiling, bright as a summer window. “You are…you! But your head is very broken.”

Solas smiled. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Sene likes daffodils.”

This stumped him. “She does?”

“They remind her of her mothers arrows in childhood.”

“There is a woman in the rotunda, sir,” said the guard. “I am sorry to interrupt. I was merely trying to remove her when this young man got in my way.”

“A woman?” said Solas.

“The All-Mother,” said Cole. “She is very weary. She does not like to be touched.”

“Mythal?” said Solas. He felt his gut fade away into the eye of obscurity. He removed the hairpin from his mouth, put it in his pocket. “How long has she been here?”

“Not long, sir,” said the guard. “Maybe fifteen minutes, at most.”

“She has only come to sit in worship of the past,” said Cole. “She does not know you’re coming.”

Solas unbuttoned his sleeve and then promptly buttoned it back up again. The button itself was made of wood, a piece fashioned for him by Sene. “Very well.”

“She thinks that you will think that she is waiting for you,” Cole went on, “but she is not. Whatever it is about her, I don’t understand. Things inside her head are like…bramble. It goes deep and dark. There are wolves in the corner, their yowling like castles in the sky. Everything is backwards and upsidedown, but she is from a seed. The same.”

They all stood in silence, listening to the sounds of the people in the Main Hall behind them. At some point, the guard cleared his throat, and Solas nodded, very stern.

“Stand down,” he said to the guard. “I will see to this myself.”

“Very well, sir,” said the guard and was on his way.

Solas turned to Cole. “Thank you, Cole. For taking her well-being into consideration.”

“You are welcome.”

“How is Cassie?”

“She is good. She had her baby not three days after you left for the Emprise du Lion.”

Solas was warmed to hear this. His heart on a skewer. “Everything went all right?” he said.

“Perfectly,” said Cole.

“Good,” said Solas. “That is very good, Cole.”

 

Inside the rotunda, Mythal stood in the purple light. The ceiling was high above her. She was small and stood with her hands clasped in front. She was wearing a new dress, very simple, made of a delicate green silk, but it hung off of her just a little, as if she had borrowed it from someone whose shoulders were slightly wider than her own.

She seemed to sense his presence right away, and she froze, and then she turned around.

“Hello, Mythal,” he said. She nodded. She looked up at the frescoes. She had old tears in her eyes but maybe they had dried already. 

“They’re extraordinary,” she said, staring up, up, straight over head. “What happened to our tower?”

“I removed it,” said Solas.

“How?”

“Magic.”

She looked at him. He walked over to the desk, leaned against its surface. He picked up a stack of letters—things that needed to be signed and returned.

“I did not come here searching for you,” said Mythal, tugging at her sleeves. “I just wanted to see what remained.”

“I understand.”

“I thought you would be with Sene.”

“I was.”

“Did the boy tell you I was here?” she said. “The one with the yellow hair. I like him. Though he is not a boy like the boys I’ve known. He is something old.”

“Yes, he is.”

“Solas,” she said.

“How did you do it?” he said, looking at her, holding her eyes real tight.

“What do you mean?”

“You are you,” he said, hands folded in his lap now. “With maybe a few minor irregularities, you are you. Your body, your mind. Pieces of it might be missing, but it’s yours.”

“Please, Solas,” she said, looking away.

“Tell me what magic you used,” he said. “I only want to understand.”

“I used my own magic,” said Mythal. “I was once a very powerful woman. Perhaps you’ve forgotten.”

“I have not forgotten.”

“Your mother taught me how.”

“Excuse me?”

"What do you think we talked about all those years, taking walks in her garden? She was my friend."

"How did she teach you?" he said.

“Seeds,” said Mythal. She began to dig around in the pockets of her dress. She took out a handful of them. Seeds. Little brown ones. Just like Cole had said. Only these were not magic seeds. They were apple seeds.

He straightened up off the desk to get a better look. 

“Your mother grew entire trees of ice from the earth,” she went on. “This is how. She took her magic, her very soul, and she formed it into seeds. I did the same.”

“Seeds?” he said.

Mythal nodded. "I trust that you understand it's not as simple as it looks."

“She never told me about this," said Solas.

“Yes, well,” said Mythal, pocketing the seeds once more. “You have your own particular talents, Solas. Nobody can compete with your magic of ancient physics. It is why we’re still here, the two of us, alone, while our _friends_ rot away in your attic of existence. Perhaps I regrew my essence, but you built this world. You are its protector.”

“Where did you plant them?” he said. “Flemeth?”

“Yes,” she said. “And the vallaslin. And the Well. And you.”

“Me?”

“I loved you,” she said. “More than I loved myself. That love was once fertile ground for planting. Unlike now. My heart has dried into paper.”

He shook his head. He felt like he was going out of his mind. “My mother is the one who showed you how to plant pieces of yourself? A cultivation tactic? Did she do the same?”

“I don’t know,” said Mythal, becoming serious. “Solas, I don’t know.”

He sat back down on the desk. He put his head in his hands.

“Have you been back?” she said.

“Back where?”

“North. Arlathan.”

“It’s in ruins,” he said. “There’s nothing there. I promise.”

“Have you been back to the site of your old house?”

“No,” he said. “Only in the Fade.”

“You should go,” she said. “You should take Sene. Who knows what you’ll find.”

He smiled, but it was filled with bitterness. He unbuttoned that same button on his sleeve from before, but he left it loose this time.

“What’s the matter?” said Mythal.

“Sene is leaving,” he said, looking around. The words like sand in his mouth.

“Leaving you, or just leaving?”

“Both?” he said. “I have no idea. She must return home to deal with a personal matter. The Free Marches. But it is more than that.”

“Why don’t you go with her?”

“Because it is not that simple.”

“Is this because of what I told her?” said Mythal. “Is it my fault?”

“No.”

“Solas?”

“Please.”

“Are you angry with me? Please do not make me wait anymore.”

“I am not angry with you, Mythal. This is not your fault.”

She covered her face with her hands then, and she turned around and dropped to a crouch. Very close to the earth. She was shaking her head. She was disassociating now. He knew her very well.

"Mythal,” he said.

“I have been trying to just put it away,” she said. “My head is like bramble. It spews everything all in such confused fashion. Knives. I am undeserving of how I feel.”

“Undeserving?”

“It was so long ago,” she said. “I know that now. But in the Fade, time passes like ice beneath the surface of the earth.”

“Stand up.”

“You built me that tower, Solas, and then you left.” She looked at him, over her shoulder. She was not crying. She stood up and she straightened her dress and fussed with her sleeves. She smoothed her brown hair, which had been cut and made shiny again and she made herself to appear bigger somehow. Pristine, as a statue. It was a talent she had cultivated over a period of many years. “Why did you leave?”

“We are talking about the Fade?”

“I had no one,” she said. “I was alone. Perhaps I deserved it. I just wish I knew why. Where did you go? All those years. You looked in from time to time, I could feel you, but you did not show yourself. Weren’t you alone as well? What were you doing? Please tell me.”

He felt nailed to something after that. A wall, the earth. He stared at her now with his hands sort of open in front of him, an offering, but it was compulsive, as he had nothing to give her, and so he fished through the dregs of his memory for the truth. He knew the heartbreak was still there, somewhere. Blackened and chewed-up and heavy. He just had to find it. He hadn’t touched it in such a long a while, and that day, when he finally did, it broke him.

“You died,” he said, very quiet. “That is why I left.”

“I know that I died. Of course I died."

“I mourned you.”

“You mourned me.”

“Yes. For thousands of years, Mythal,” he said. “I mourned you. I grieved. Like an animal. How else does a man move on?”

“Like an animal?”

He ignored her. “I lost my heart in pieces on the sidewalk that day,” he said. “In the city, when Abelas—perhaps you’ve lost perspective on what happened. My best friend was driven to insanity by our former ally and betrayed me in ways that took me millenia to process, and after the Veil, I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t. I couldn’t even think about it. Seeing you again, after so much time had passed in the Fade, it was like meeting a ghost. You were an echo. I couldn’t leave you like that, Mythal. I loved you. You were a force of nature, and you deserved your form. So I gave you form, but I needed to move on. I couldn’t be with you. That is why I left.”

She was just staring at him. Her eyes very big, like orbs of pure silence. Brown and blue, all at once. The night sky. She was not crying. She was waiting. She was surprised by his reaction. This outpouring of emotion and pain from a man she had formerly known as the most stoic, poised creature in the wild. But he was no longer in the wild. What had happened. What had happened. “I don’t understand,” she said.

“I am sorry, Mythal,” he went on. He felt like he was hanging apart. Like a whole layer of him had peeled off, exposing his insides for everybody to touch and hurt, but this was to be expected.

“What are you sorry for?”

“For leaving you,” he said. “I am sorry. I know you think that I blame you for everything that happened.”

“You don’t?”

“No. I have been angry with you, yes. Again and again, but that is living. We are just living by the code of our circumstances, and our circumstances have always been shit. Our relationship was complicated, but you never wronged me. You loved me, and you protected me, and you protected my mother, and you helped us to preserve the memory of my father, and all of this, long before we were ever sleeping together. My guilt over the fact that I could not protect _you_ in the end—that has ruined me in more ways than you will ever know. For a long time, it stripped me of my compassion. It made me weak. It turned me against you. That is what happened.” He looked down at the palms of his hands. He was lost, shaking his head over and over and over. “And now,” he said, “because of all this, I am going to lose the one woman I have left.”

“What?” said Mythal. “You are lying. Don’t do that, Solas, after everything you just said, after it has all come to pass. I am alive. The magister is dead. Your life has begun.”

“Yes. As the Veil comes crumbling down around me, piece by piece, in ways that I can no longer predict. It is like some sort of living metaphor. Sene is still infected with the anchor. There is no way for me to remove it. The orb is gone and with it, any hope I had of fixing her and restoring order to this place that I have, in all of my denial and frustration, somehow ended up calling my home.”

“The Veil is the Veil, Solas,” said Mythal. “Do not lament it now, as such bounty hovers within your grasp. Nothing lasts forever, but if there is anything this world is filled with, it is time. What is it that you want?”

“I want Sene.”

“Then you will prevail.”

“You are saying that love is enough?”

“No,” said Mythal. “I am saying that you have only just begun. You are a builder, Solas. But you must stop trying to preserve a life that you have not built yet. You have always done exactly what you must in order to get what you want. You are very, very good at getting what you want. You want a life with this woman. What must you do to get that?”

“She is confused by everything that’s happened,” said Solas. “I don’t blame her. She needs to figure it out, and I cannot do it for her. I have to let her go.”

“Then do it.”

“I am. I am doing it. It is killing me.”

“That is not a woman who goes lightly,” said Mythal. “If she was, then we would not even be in this dilemma. She would already be gone, and you know that it’s true. She is a tough specimen. Worthy, in the end. Give it time.”

He got up from the desk, and he went over to the wall. It was a colorful piece and very beautiful, covered in the fruits of his own life’s work. It had been painstaking, many hours. He thought for a moment that he wanted to physically beat the shit out of that wall. He almost did, and in a past life, he would have, without hestitation. But then for some reason, he remembered the voice of that fucking nurse that he’d seen more than a month before, after returning from Crestwood and dealing with the bandits who killed Cassie’s husband: _You should really stop punching things, Solas._ What a fucking revelation. Stop punching things, Solas. So he breathed through the deafening pain in his chest, and he tried to remember what it was like when his father was alive. Whe he was just a kid. He had no responsibilities. His one true happiness was putting a butterfly into a jar, just like his father had taught him, and the way his mother smiled when she saw how it lit the room. Was that it. Was that purity.

And so Solas did not punch that wall. Instead, he just pressed against it very hard with his forehead and the palms of his hands. The lights in the room dimmed and flickered. A glass that had been filled with water on the desk shattered and made a loud noise. The water went all over the letters and onto the ground. There was a disturbance.

“Everything all right down there, apostate?” said Dorian from overhead.

“Everything is fine, Tevinter.”

“Just checking.”

“Solas,” said Mythal. She approached him, but she kept her distance. She understood what she was dealing with.

“Yes,” he said.

“Are you okay?”

“No.”

She glanced up to the balcony, but the handsome man with the mustache had gone.

“Don’t you have a party to get to?” said Mythal.

“Hours from now.”

“You came back here for what. To work?”

“Yes.”

“I will see myself out.”

“You can stay if you'd like,” he said, looking at her, all ragged, but in control. “I know how to paint with you in the room.”

“That’s all right,” she said, pushing up her sleeves. She had a linen bandage now, covering the place she had scratched raw in the week before. “I’ll just go back to my quarters. I didn’t sleep well last night.”

He straightened up then, finally. He closed his eyes, breathed, put his hands in his pockets once more. “Where are you sleeping, Mythal?” he said.

“At first, I was in this weird little room way up high,” she said. “Close to the spirit child. It’s how he found me. But this morning I negotiated a much better situation. It is a little alcove, right above the tavern. It has a rooftop ledge and a lovely window.”

Solas opened his eyes. “With Sera?”

“Yes, that is her name. Sera. She is tall? Very tall. All of these tall girl elves. I do not fit in. But I am not staying with Sera. She gave me the alcove.”

“How did you get Sera to give you her alcove?”

“She is moving in with her lover in the Undercroft,” said Mythal. “We ran into each other in the garden. She had a boxful of daggers. Very big ones. She asked me who I was, and I told her the truth.”

“The truth about what?”

“That I am Mythal,” she said, “and that the rest of the elven pantheon is a lie, just like me. That, in reality, we were nothing but noble beasts who enslaved our people and used our wealth and privilege to destroy our kingdom.”

Solas just stared at her, in some mild state of shock. “That is one sure way to gain Sera’s approval.”

“It worked for me.” Mythal shrugged. “She found it to be hilarious. She laughed for ten whole minutes. I thought she would never stop.”

“What else did you tell her.”

“I did not tell her about you,” she said. She looked away so that all he could see were the tops of her eye lashes. “She looks up to you, Solas. Loves you like a sister. My mind is—clearer now. Strange how quickly things come to light in this world. Though I should not be surprised. You have always been a man of efficiency, and this _is_ a world of your invention.”

“You know that is not how it works,” he said.

“In any case, I would not make the same mistake twice.”

He picked up her chin then, out of nowhere. He held her face in the palm of his hand for just one moment, felt her shudder. She smiled and there were tears, and he promptly put his hand back in his pocket. When he looked at her, he felt this sort of old, historic longing. Like cracks in the sidewalk where the tree roots break free. Like the world was about to end, and she was all there was. He had loved her young, before he even knew what real love meant, and it changed him into a focused man. But he had always held such duty to women. He just wanted one that he could be with now. He didn’t want that job anymore.

“I’ll see you,” he said.

“Do not be hopeless, Solas,” said Mythal, blotting her eyes delicately with the edge of her sleeve. “That is not your quest.”

He just smiled. “My _quest_ ,” he said. “That is an interesting way of putting it, Mythal."

           

At the party that night, things were as expected. Solas had allowed himself to be _coiffed_ , but only a little, and there was not enough time to get all the paint off his hands. It had been kind of a high octane afternoon in the rotunda, and he'd got a lot done. He had somehow charmed Josie, however, into thinking that his dirty hands would somoehow be a _benefit,_ that it might increase his aura as a  _rustic_ warrior _,_ and when Sene was still not downstairs after about forty-five minutes or so, he finally had one of the servants bring him a very stiff drink and found himself sitting at the end of a very loud table, next to Thom Rainier, who was already a little tipsy and kept trying to trick Solas into playing Diamond Back, high stakes, and no holds barred.

“You will lose,” said Solas. “Trust me, Thom. You lose every time.”

Thom found this to be hilarious. “If I didn’t know any better, Solas, I’d say you invented this game.”

“I did invent it,” said Solas, drinking deeply. “When I was seventeen.”

Thom found this to be hilarious as well.

Everybody seemed to be wearing hats. But it was not like the Winter Palace, or the Berrande estate outside Val Royeaux. It was not like Arlathan. At Skyhold those days, the dire opulence and cultural reach of Orlais was outplayed by some semblance of northern authenticity. That was the image that Sene inspired, and he by her side. She was a Dalish elf, and though a rich Dalish elf with a great deal of privilege considering, she was unimpressed by money and big ideas, and she favored good people. Country living. The salt of the earth. This is part of why he loved her, because it made him think of his childhood, and he was painfully aware of this now, so aware, in fact, that it was like fangs in his neck, sucking him empty. He was aware of everything. He was awake and alive and brand new, and in this, apparently filled with stupidity.

He finished his drink, was served another, and after a little while more, was approached by Cassie. She was a small and stable postpartum woman with a little baby in her arms, her brown hair up in a scribbly bun. But she was vital. She looked alive and well. She smiled up at him. It felt like it had been years.

“It is a good day,” he said. “Seeing you.”

The baby was just like this little sleeping animal, the skin so new, it was almost translucent. He touched its tiny wrist, and then he put his hand back in his pockets.

“How are you feeling?” he said.

“Good,” she said. “I mean, tired. Healing still. How are you? I heard you took a bad hit in the Emprise du Lion. Is your head all right?”

“I am fine now,” he said. “Thank you for asking.”

“I still can’t think of a good name for him,” she said, nudging the baby’s warm cheek with her own. “He is nameless. Cole suggested I name him _Solas_."

"Solas?"

"After you, but that seemed odd. It’s a good enough name, Solas. I mean no offense. I just don’t know what it means.”

“It means _pride,_ ” said Solas. “Or _w_ _isdom_ in ancient times. And I am flattered that you would even consider it, but I’m certain there are much better names for you to choose from.”

“Like what?”

“What about your husband’s name,” he said. “John, was it? That is a strong name.”

“John,” she said, smiling at her boots. “Maybe.”

“Maybe," he said.

He rolled up his sleeves. He looked around. 

"Have you been painting?" said Cassie. "You're covered in it."

He looked down at his hands. "Yes," he said. 

"Cole showed me your frescoes while you were gone. How they tell a story. Where did you learn to paint like that?"

"In another life," he said. Then, he looked up, and finally, that is when he saw her. Sene.

"Solas?" said Cassie.

"Would you please excuse me?" he said. "I'm very sorry."

Sene was leaning over the railing of Vivienne's suite overhead, just watching the party as it went on below. 

"Of course," said Cassie, following his gaze, shifting her nameless baby from one arm to the other. "Go get the Inquisitor. We can talk a different day."

"A different day," he said. He thanked her.

 

Sene was alone up there. She was wearing a silk dress, very simple, white. It was like a grown-up version of the dress she’d wore in Crestwood the day he removed her vallaslin.

She turned around as he approached. He had his hands in his pockets.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hello, vhenan.”

“How did you know I was up here?”

“I could sense you," he said.

“Of course you could.”

“You look good,” he said. “I like that dress.”

“Well, you would."

“I am serious,” he said.

She blushed. “You've got paint on your hands," she said. "And you smell like whiskey.”

“I only had one,” he said, "and a half. I was looking for you.”

“I got here way before you. I was bored.”

"That’s okay. It’s your party, vhenan. You can hide if you want to.”

“I’m not hiding,” she said. “I wouldn’t do that. I’m just taking a break.”

“I know.”

“I know everyone is happy that it’s over," she said.

“And you?”

She shrugged. There were little flowers in her hair. This brought something to mind, and so he fashioned a daffodil from his pocket. He gave it to her.

“What’s this for?”

“A little bird told me you like daffodils.”

“A little bird named Cole," she said. "My mother used to fletch arrows from the feathers of yellow ducks in the spring. They always looked like daffodils to me.”

“You look a little like a daffodil. If daffodils were red.”

“Shut up,” she said. She shoved him, just a little. "Thank you for the flower."

Together, they leaned over the railing and watched the party.

“Did you talk to Josephine?” he said.

“Yes,” said Sene.

“When will you leave?” he said.

She did not answer, not at first.

"Sene?”

“Tomorrow,” she said.

He took a deep breath, hung his head. “All right.”

“She said it’s a good time,” said Sene. “She said the sooner the better. Everything’s quiet.”

“Are you going alone?” he said.

“Morrigan and Kieran are going to come,” she said. “And maybe Sera. Plus as many Inquisition soldiers as Cullen can muster, I'm sure.”

“Sera will want to bring Dagna."

“I don’t mind,” said Sene. "We'll be back."

He put his arm around her. They listened to the party going on below like it was anything else. Laughter and huge voices. All of their friends together in one place. There were no crickets this time, no wolves or enemies in the overpass.

“We should go,” she said.

“Not yet,” he said.

She put her head on his shoulder.

 

Eventually they did return. The Comte and Comtesse Berrande were both there, and to Josie’s delight, Solas promised to give them both a private tour within the week. Varric, Sera, and Cassandra all shouted over hands of Wicked Grace while Thom had swindled Bull and Dorian into a game of Diamond Back, and Dorian beat them both handily. They watched Morrigan return a heavy quilt to the Commander, and the two of them spoke freely beside a great big bowl of cherries, Morrigan sipping from a glass of clear liquor. Kieran was, of course, up too late, talking seriously with Josie by the light of a great big chandelier. Sene and Solas moved through the people like proud, tall beauties from another life. Everyone wanted to touch Sene's hands and her hair and to hear their stories of the assassins and the magister in the Keep. She obliged them. And Solas, on his best behavior, entertained the masses with ease.

At the end of the night, they slipped away. They went upstairs and had champagne. They built a fire and made love in the bed, and afterward, they lie there like daffodils.

"Sene," he said after a while. He was on his back. She was sitting beside him, naked and freckled in the firelight, braiding her hair over her shoulder. 

"Yes?"

But he couldn't think of anything to say. So instead, he just watched.

There are moments in which you realize that your life is, rather than some transcendent arc of high importance, just a rapid accumulation of images, feelings and fears, actions. Things said and not said. Bell towers, recipes. Almost all of it flung forth by inertia alone. People aren't stories. People are alive, and living is unpredictable. Living is hard. This was a pretty girl, and she loved him, braiding her hair in bed. He would have done anything for her. Time is freely given, thought Solas. On the path to happiness, no single moment can be wasted or forgotten by time, no matter how insignificant it may seem. But these moments cannot be relived once they have passed. Nothing lasts forever, and so the only choice is to go forth.

The next morning, Sene packed her things. He walked her to the gate, and they said goodbye.  _Wide open,_ he thought. Her caravan promptly disappeared up, over, and through a mountain pass. _Wide open._ He was standing very tall with his hands in his pockets. The Commander was nearby, and Thom Rainier as well. Cole was waving from the battlements, still without his hat, even though it was a chilly morning.

 _Wide open,_ thought Solas as he watched her go. He would see her again. The whole world was wide open. _Like a window._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **END BOOK III**


	44. Dream Symbols

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On their own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **BOOK IV: SPRING**

It was mid-afternoon, and he was seventeen years old. Waking up, finding his mother working in the garden. So calm, in her gloves and wide-brimmed hat, and she pruned the roses with a large set of sheers. The day had been clear, the sky pink and jeweled. You could see all the way to the spiked, crystal silhouette of Arlathan. It was otherwise countryside for days. He rembered feeling like shit, but he liked the fresh air. Being outside, a part of something bigger than himself.

He entered the garden through the gate. Its hinges needing to be oiled, so he made a mental note. He crouched beside her. She turned to have a look at him, his face still bruised raw from the knuckle fights the night before. When she saw him, she set down the sheers and removed her gloves. She held his jaw gently in her small, cold hand and turned his face to the right so she could survey the purpled skin, the split lip. _You need a little more ice_ , she said. Then she commanded his eyes, and once he gave, she smiled, soft. _It looks better_. He nodded, resigning. Whenever she released him like that, it was like falling. So he sank back, leaning against the fence with his elbows on his knees, shredding a long, fat weed in his fingers. He tipped his head up, squinted into the sky. The clouds were like pale handkerchiefs up there, twisting past the sun.

She put on her gloves, returned to the rose bushes. _So what happened with Ghilan’nain?_ she said.

_What?_

_She was here earlier, on her bike. Looking for you. She looked like she’d been crying._

Solas sighed. He swore under his breath and put his face into his hands.

She did not push him.

After a little while, he looked up, watched her prune the roses. She did it all by hand. The roses, everything. In their garden, they grew roses, barley, thyme, potato, leeks, and onion. Citrus. Apple trees. It smelled good. Solas’s mother believed in bodies. Whenever they worked in the garden, she demanded they check their magic at the gate. It was one of her only rules. She was a healer, and so bodies were a part of her science, her art. Sweat and muscle, skin and lemon sun only. Solas had built that fence when he was only fourteen years old, the shed when he was fifteen. All by himself. A lot of Solas’s raw, unbridled strength came from the hard labor of building things in and around the garden, hauling, and planting with his hands. No magic. The men of Arlathan were soft, his mother had used to say. They relied too much on magic. Physicality was an asset, and she understood this, even then. She was smart. For this, he would be eternally grateful.

 _Solas?_ she said to him. The pollen like a yellow song in the air, making him itch.

_Hmm?_

_Where are you?_

_Right here._

 

Whenever Solas woke up from a memory like this, he remained disoriented for five or six minutes. The transition was slow those days, like surfacing from a deep pool of oil. Even still, most nights after he dropped off to sleep, he found himself navigating the Fade. It was exhausting, reliving his childhood, but whenever he wasn’t—here, in the Fade, he was having dreams of Sene. Upside-down fucked dreams of Sene, with her body and her red hair, everything wet and dark, like the inside of a cave.

The night before she left, she’d pressed into him. She made him feel like a man again. His body working against them at every turn, they’d had to be gentle but this had somehow heightened the intensity, and he thought he remembered letting loose inside her for the first time in months, but it could just as easily have been a dream. It was all messed up—memory, dreaming. He couldn’t get it out of his head—what had happened, and over time, it became a fantasy unhinged. There was no way to know what was real. He only knew that she’d picked up her dress and fit him inside, smiling as she lowered, and that this is when he glanced over to the bedside table, and he saw that daffodil. Daffodils, and he closed his eyes. Then, dream logic. The dreams of her were so real, he’d wake up rock hard and halfway over the edge and have to finish himself off before he could fall back asleep. Ribs stiff. Lonely, frustrated, his mind in ruins. A man can only take so much.

With this, and such slow transitions out of the Fade, he began to wonder if there had been some serious damage done to his head in the Emprise du Lion. He had hit it pretty hard. So two weeks or so after Sene was gone, he gave Dorian full access to his consciousness, and his energies, which was not something he had ever done before with another mage, save for Mythal, and that had been trust and partnership in a time of war, and you can see how desperate he was. In any case, Dorian assured him it was all superficial. _You’re psyching yourself out, apostate,_ he said where they sat across from one another in the rotunda. _Your melon is intact._

Like the truest sentence ever spoken. Dorian smirked without apology.

Solas slept in Sene’s quarters every night—their quarters. Their bed. Because that’s what it was. And before long, the room had become messy and boring as any life that he knew without women. Books and shit everywhere. The last time he was here, alone, without her, there had been a clock on the thing. He knew she’d be back within a couple of weeks. But this time, with the Free Marches so fucking far away, there was the possibility for her to be gone for several months, as she had been unprepared to give him a timeline, just as he had been unprepared to ask for one. So he grew careless in his own regime and drank too much whiskey. His ribs were a bit better, though they still hampered his movement quite a bit. He spent a lot of time painting and working in the garden with the Chantry sisters. He told Bull and Dorian the truth about who he was on a Thursday, almost three weeks past Sene’s departure.

“You’re the Dread Wolf?” said Dorian. “So those are your bloody statues we see every which where we go?”

Solas sighed. They were at the tavern, in a lazy, bronze corner. There was a deck of cards meant for Diamond Back stacked neatly in the center of the table, untouched. “I did not build those statues,” he said, picking up his glass. It was made of crystal and had a heavy bottom. “They were built on my behalf. And, as I said earlier, there is no Dread Wolf, Dorian. That is a myth.”

“Some kind of arrogance, don’t you think? The statues, that is. Not that I’m surprised.”

“I tell you I am an ancient elf,” said Solas, “that I slept in Uthenara for 9,000 years, and that I am responsible for the construction of the Veil, and you have fixated on statues?”

Dorian finished his wine.

“So…you’re like, a god?” said Bull. “Nice.”

Solas sighed once more. “No,” he said. “I am a man.”

“But Mythal,” said Bull. He was tracing a great finger around the rim of his glass. “Is she, uh—she’s the real Mythal then, right? Like the All-mother with the…transforming into dragons, and all that. You hit that?”

“For the love of Andraste,” said Dorian. “Those are just stories.” He looked at Solas. “Or…?”

Solas put his face in his hands. They were quiet for a long time, nothing but the sounds of the people in the room, lots of them. The tavern was busy most nights with Corypheus in the dust.

At some point, Solas felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. It was Bull. “Thanks for letting us know, Solas,” he said.

Solas looked up. “You are welcome.”

“Indeed,” said Dorian, very serious. “We’ll need to talk more though, you and I. If you are who you say you are. I have many questions.”

“I knew you would.”

“Who else knows?”

“Just Sene,” said Solas. “And Morrigan.”

“Morrigan?”

“The Well,” said Solas, a little weary. “She knew before anyone, she just didn’t realize. Sene herself only learned the truth about a month ago.”

Somewhere nearby, a man tripped over the bard. The music sort of strangled, and they all turned to see. It was Krem.

“Apologies,” said Krem.

The bard blushed. Bull grunted.

“Is this why you didn’t go with her?” said Dorian. “To the Free Marches?” He seemed to be watcing Solas very closely, but then he looked down to the bottom of his empty glass. “You don’t have to answer that.”

Solas watched as Krem helped the bard back to her feet and finished his whiskey. “It’s part of it,” he said. There was nothing else.

They ordered more drinks and went until the night got a little murky. They never played cards. Solas fell asleep in the rotunda with all the candles still lit and his face flat on the desk.

           

How did _names_ work in Elvhenan? Sene had never asked him before. It was unimportant, and yet, it was everything. A house was named for its patriarch—that’s what he would eventually tell her. _Solas, House of Marin._ There were of course ways around and within this, depending upon circumstance, but this was tradition. There were no last names or clan titles. Women married into houses. Men married out of them. Patriarchs took the names of their wives. _Marin, House of Leanathy._ A romantic reminder of their partnership. Solas took the name of his father, because that is what children did. But there was no significance to a house name in Elvhenan unless that house was of significance. Solas never would have introduced himself as _Solas, House of Marin._ He was just Solas, utilitarian, and the rest was unworthy of mention. When Leanathy married Solas’s father, she abandoned her father’s name, a name that signified safety and importance, for a name that, to the wealthy nobles of Arlathan, signified nothing at all. Invisibility. She married for love, an uncommon decision in the ruling class. Not many were as brave or determined as she, and so of course, the price was high.

Solas knew very little of his mother’s family and their relationships to one another. Like Solas, she preferred to keep things inside. That night, he was too tired to navigate the Fade, and so he dreamt that Sene had asked him about names. _What is my name?_ she said. She was wrapped in a linen sheet, as if she had only just woken up in the morning. She was standing in a single beam of sunlight coming through a window overhead. They were in a kitchen somewhere. This was good. The claustrophobia was gone. Her bow was tipped over on the floor by her feet. Solas wanted to go pick it up and hand it to her, but there was no reason. They were safe in this place. He wondered why she didn’t just cross the room to be with him, and why he didn’t do the same to be with her. This was a different kind of dream. She wasn’t dropping the sheet. He was close to the surface.

 _Your name is Isene,_ he said. He was wearing suspenders. He had his hands in his pockets.

She nodded like she already knew, like she had only forgotten for a little while. She looked around then. _I think the Commander is here,_ she said. Then she looked up and out the window. _Do you hear that?_

“Solas.”

_The Commander?_

He opened his eyes. Cullen stood about halfway between the desk and the doorway. He had his hands behind his back. He looked concerned.

Solas almost dropped back off the moment he saw him. It was a terrible feeling, clawing his way from such a deep well. He shook out his head. He rubbed his eyes. “Commander,” he said, his voice like rocks. “Is everything all right?”

“I should ask you the same,” said Cullen.

“I am fine,” said Solas. He leaned back in his chair, dug the heels of his palms into his eyes. “What can I do for you?”

“Meet me in my office when you’re fully awake,” said Cullen. “I have a matter of some importance to discuss with you.”

“What kind of matter?” said Solas.

“We’ll speak of it then.” Cullen glanced around. He looked up at the frescoes—the one of Empress Celene in particular. He wore a gray sweater and a pair of heavy slacks. “Are you almost finished?” he said. “With all of this?”

Solas felt like an eye in the middle of the room. Just one big, solid eye. He could see everything. He could smell the paint. His head was killing him.

 

Sene had a dream that night that there were vines growing out of her stomach and up her throat and coming out of her mouth. They grew huge berries, the size of her head. The vines followed her around wherever she went, and while she knew there was something not quite right, she had no idea what to do about them. _They are growing from inside my body,_ she said to the mirror and nobody else. _There’s nothing I can do._

She awoke in her old bed in the Free Marches, feeling defective and uneasy.

They had, since her departure, built new houses in the Lavellan compound—most likely with the boon paid to them by the Inquisition. This had been for a number of, what Josie would call, _diplomatic reasons_. The Lavellans were not an easy sell, and they had a lot of power in the north. Sene was an asset. It was bullshit, but it was true. She had creamy white walls and the paper flowers were strung up on the ceiling overhead, hanging there like little lanterns that did not glow. She had a dresser. She had a wash bowl, and a window. It was a lovely and simple display.

There was somebody knocking on the door.

“Who is it?” said Sene.

“It is Cassandra.”

“Come in.”

Cassandra came in quietly, and closed the door behind her. She was wearing a long-sleeved tunic, the color purple with pretty shapes embroidered at the collar. The craftsmanship was familiar. Sene had never seen her wear anything like it. “I like that shirt,” said Sene.

“This?” said Cassandra. She seemed to blush. “Your mother lent it to me. Apparently what I had on was a disgrace.”

“She said that?”

“No. It was a kind gesture. She gave one to Morrigan as well.”

Sene was sitting up now with her bare feet on the floor. There was a fire in the room and a small chimney. She smoothed the hair off her face. She could not shake the dream. She was wearing a pair of battered cotton pants and one of Solas’s shirts—she’d had it since almost the beginning. She had worn it so often, that it had, at some point, simply become hers. She did not even think of it.

“How are you feeling?” said Cassandra.

“Tired. How are you?”

“It’s beautiful here.” Cassandra sat down on the bed. “Your clan’s farm is something to behold, even in winter. Though I suppose winter here is not like it is in the east of Orlais. I’m glad I came along, despite all this business with the Divine. You know, I have never been to Ansburg.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Sene. “It’s kind of a backwater place.”

“Yes, well. That is what they say.”

Sene smiled, but only briefly. She got up and went over to the dresser. There was a hand mirror, made of wood. She picked it up, looked at her reflection, and then turned it over on its face.

“Is something wrong?” said Cassandra.

“No,” said Sene. “It’s nothing.”

“It does not seem like nothing,” she said.

Sene turned around. She leaned heavily against the drawers so that the dresser creaked. She felt very tall all of a sudden, almost giant, and she sighed. She hung her head. “How long has it been since we left Skyhold?”

“Nineteen days,” said Cassandra.

“Nineteen?”

“I keep count. I do not like to lose track of the weeks. Why?”

“Because,” said Sene. “I just—” She dug her thumb into the middle of her palm. Like she was massaging something out of her hand. Some tension that had not been there before. “Nevermind.”

“What is it?”

Sene pressed the palms of her hands to her cheeks and shook her head.

“Sene?”

“I’m late,” she said.

“Late,” said Cassandra. “Late to what?”

“ _Late_ ,” said Sene. “I’m late. My period is late.”

“Oh,” said Cassandra, a little slow on the uptake. "I see." She waited as Sene vibrated there on the other side of the room with her big, red hair and her freckled face. Pretty, but not delicate, not what men expected her to be, and this was something to which Cassandra, even amidst her own self-consciousness and her distinct lack of woman friends, could relate. Cassandra straightened up with her hands in her lap. “How late?”

“Like five days?”

“Is that terribly late for you?”

“I'm not sure. Why?”

“You are a warrior, Sene.” Cassandra stood from the bed. She had her hands cupped in front of her. She lowered her voice and remained calm. “If there is anything I know about this life that we live, it’s that it takes its toll on our bodies in more ways than one. It has a way of making irregularity feel more or less…regular.”

“I know you’re right,” said Sene, looking at her hands. “I just can’t shake this.”

“Have you and Solas—I mean, recently. I assume that you have.”

“The night before we left,” said Sene.

“All right,” said Cassandra. “Well, it could be stress, the travel. These are important factors to consider. Or, it could be that—of course there is the possibility that you’re—”

“Pregnant,” said Sene. She shook her head. “Again.”

“Again?”

Sene dropped to a crouch. She put her face in her hands. “ _Fuck._ ”

Cassandra faltered, just for a moment. Everything in the room became very serious all of a sudden. The curtains, moving with the breeze. The sounds of children outside. Serious. They were alone. She knelt next to Sene on the floor, cautious, and placed her hand on Sene’s shoulder. “Sene?”

“I’m okay,” she said. "I"m okay."

“What did you mean by _again_?”

“I’m sorry we aren’t better friends,” said Sene. She was sort of crying now, but Cassandra could sense her pushing it back. “Everything happened so fast. I should have told you everything. You should have been with us at the Keep.”

“I was buried in negotiations, per the Divine. It is understandable that I was not there.”

“I’m glad you’re here now.”

“You and I are friends,” said Cassandra. “Sene, it’s all right. Please, talk to me.”

“I was pregnant before,” said Sene, wiping her cheeks on her sleeve. “In the Emprise du Lion, the first time. I didn’t know. I had a miscarriage after that Shadow staked me in the back.”

“A miscarriage?”

“I didn’t even notice when it happened,” said Sene. “It was so early, and I was unconscious for days. Solas told me months later. Cole, I guess—he could sense it? Or something. I don’t know.”

“Maker’s breath,” said Cassandra. “I am sorry, Sene.”

“Thank you,” said Sene. “But it’s not as big of a deal as it seems. We got past it. Like I said, it had been early. But now I just can’t help but think that—” She closed her eyes.

“Think what?”

“That—if I am. That the same thing will happen again?”

“Sene,” said Cassandra. “You will not be fighting red lyrium Templars any time soon.”

“I know,” said Sene. “I know.”

“And you did not know before. This time, if it is true, you are prepared.”

“I know.”

“Besides that. Besides what you’ve already been through—if you are pregnant, Sene, what will you do?”

Sene shrugged, dejected. “Go back,” she said.

“Or you could summon Solas here,” said Cassandra. “To your family’s farm. Could you not? He would come in an instant.”

“I know he would,” said Sene. “I left him back there, because we needed some time. But now I’m all fucked up. I wish he was here.”

“You followed your instincts, and you did what you thought was right for the two of you,” said Cassandra. “And you do not know yet for sure that you are pregnant. You should talk to Morrigan.”

“Morrigan?”

“She has been pregnant and delivered a child. She is also a mage. The other day, she smelled my perfume, and from its scent alone, was able to guess the exact meadow in Nevarra that it had reminded me of when I purchased it in Val Royeaux. It was a meadow from my childhood, where I used to dig for worms with my cousins. It was remarkable, almost like she’d read my mind.”

Sene was just staring at her. “You wear perfume?”

“Sometimes,” said Cassandra. “When the mood strikes. The point is, that perhaps she could offer you some insight that I cannot.”

Sene tipped over into Cassandra then, hugged her, furiously. Her big red hair rising up and surrounding them both. The room was filled with sunlight coming in the window, the smell of clean nature and pine. “Thank you, Cass,” said Sene. “For being here.”

“It is my pleasure, Sene.”

She was so tall. For an elf, it was extraordinary. Just as tall as Cassandra. Not as big, of course. She was lithe, long and lean, but strong. A battle archer, the Inquisitor. But she was also just a confused young woman in love.

They parted. “When are your plans to visit the city, per your late friend’s request?”

“Tomorrow,” said Sene. “Not until tomorrow.”

“I would like to come with you, if that is all right. To see the town, but also just to offer my support.”

“Yes,” said Sene to Cassandra. “That would be good.” She put the hair behind her ears. She tried to smile. She did not seem entirely whole that morning, but considering everything she’d been through, this was to be expected.

 

Afterward, Sene left Cassandra with Morrigan and Kieran out in the vineyards. They wanted to go for a walk through the grounds, and so her Uncle Ellas offered to take them. He was a good man, sturdy and fair and younger than her father and also a hunter, and he had often been the one to cover for Sene whenever she got bored on the farm and ran off into the city. _You want to see some shit?_ he would say, chewing on a chicken bone, fletching an arrow by the fire. _Then go see some shit, Ise. But you better bring back something good to show for it_. As lead huntress, she reported directly to Keeper Deshanna. She had not seen him yet this trip. He was with her father, in Wycome, negotiating the buy-out of some other grain liquor operation in the area. This one was small, _artisinal._ Some bullshit like that. She wasn't sure if it was Dalish elves or just humans. A part of her wondered if they had not planned the trip deliberately to avoid her return.

In any case, Sene was not up to it—a walk in the vineyard. She was not ready to talk to Morrigan just yet. She had this feeling that Morrigan would be able to read it off her right away, and she needed more time. There were Inquisition soldiers stationed at multiple camps surrounding the perimeter of the Lavellan compound, which was quite enormous—several hundred acres, last Sene checked. Their presence tended to irritate her Dalish relatives, as did Sene’s _human_ companions, but Kieran was a charming helper regardless, and Morrigan and Cassandra were perfect house guests, and given Sene’s status in the clan, they had very little recourse. Still, in a way, Sene was glad that Sera had decided to meet them down in Crestwood when they got back to the south. She missed her, but this took a bit of the pressure off, and Sene felt a little bad about thinking this way but made no effort to justify. Sera and Dagna had begun making their plans to take a vacation, north in Antiva City. They had not, in the end, been eager to leave Skyhold, not just yet.

That morning, Sene found her mother sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee from a blue porcelain mug and stitching a patch to a pair of torn trousers. Her red hair trimmed and pinned off of her face, it was a lot like Sene’s, only blanched somehow, more orange than red, and she was freckled, too, and though she was not as tall as Sene, she was still pretty tall. Both of her parents were big for elves, her father probably almost as tall as Solas, and she wondered if this would make him any more desirable? A big man to pass down big genes. She became very itchy on the back of her neck and backs of her knees all of a sudden, and so she leaned in the doorway, with her arms crossed over her chest.

Her mother looked up. She set away her thread and her needle, and she smiled.

“Good morning,” she said, “Isene.”

“Hey.”

“Did you sleep all right?”

“Sort of,” said Sene, in the doorway still. “My room is nice. The whole place, it’s very nice.”

“I think so, too,” said her mother. She sort of stared at Sene’s face for a while—the nakedness there. Sene had sent word about her vallaslin a long time ago, just to prepare them. They’d still never talked about it. “Come sit down. Have some coffee.”

“I’m okay,” said Sene.

Her mother looked surprised then, as she surveyed Sene’s appearnance. “Is that a man’s shirt?” she said.

Sene looked down. “Oh.” She had forgotten. “How can you tell?”

“The shoulders,” said her mother.

Sene nodded. The prickles again, this time at her forehead. “Right.”

“Is this the same tall, elven man you wrote to me about a few months back?”

Blushing, Sene looked at the tea pot. It was very old—a relic from a time before. “Yes.”

Her mother straightened up then. She fluffed her hair. She waited, seemingly cautious.

“What?” said Sene.

“Based on your cagey disposition,” said her mother. “I am going to take a guess and say that this man is not a Dalish elf.”

“No,” said Sene. “He is not.”

“Andrastian?” said her mother. “Is he from the alienages?”

“No. He’s not really anything,” said Sene. “He’s from far away, north. A village. His father was an architect.”

“What does he do? This man. Other than his part for the Inquisition.”

“He’s a warrior,” said Sene.

“That much I understand.”

“He’s a mage.” Sene started pressing her thumb into the palm of her hand again, an odd tick she had only just picked up some days before. “He paints.”

“An artist?”

“Yes. He’s very good.”

“What kinds of things does he paint?”

“Frescoes, mostly?” said Sene. “I don’t really know the vocabulary. Some portraiture.”

“And he is a mage, you said.”

“Yes,” said Sene.

“Circle Mage?”

“No. Apostate.”

“Rebel?”

“Solas is a hedge mage,” said Sene. “Same as Morrigan. He studies…rift magic. The Fade. It’s a rare specialty.”

“Solas?” said her mother. “That is his name? _Pride_?”

“Yes.”

Her mother took a sip of her coffee. Outside, you could hear the sounds of wind chimes, little bones and shells. “Tell me more about him.”

“What would you like to know?” said Sene.

“How old is he?”

Sene gave her a look. “Is that important?”

“No,” said her mother, taking a deep breath. “Not unless it’s important to you.”

“He is older,” said Sene.

“How much older?”

“Older.”

Her mother was quiet for a moment. She folded her lovely hands on the pale pink table cloth then unfolded them once more. She studied her clear nails. “Are we talking ten years? Twenty years?”

“Ten years,” said Sene.

“All right.”

“I am not a child. Please don’t look at me like that.”

“I do not think you are a child, Isene,” said her mother. “I’m not looking at you like anything. I was just surprised, that is all.”

“You don’t know what happened,” said Sene. “What I was asked to grapple with after the conclave.”

“I know that, Sene. I am not pretending that I do. But he does? Was he there, with you?”

“Not at the conclave,” said Sene. “But after. He has been by my side since the beginning. We were friends first, for a long time.”

“Where is he now?” said her mother.

“He stayed behind, at Skyhold. That is the name of our keep.”

“Okay. Yes, I knew that.”

“He’s a good man,” said Sene.

"And tall.”

“Yes.”

“Well, you seem very serious about him, Isene.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because,” said her mother. “You have defended him at every pass, and for no good reason.”

“No good reason? Are you kidding me?”

“I have not once attacked him,” said her mother. “I know you’re worried that we will disapprove.”

“I know you will disapprove,” said Sene. “Or, maybe _you_ won’t. But you’re you. I’m talking about dad. And Deshanna. He is not Dalish, mom. Believe me when I say that he is not what they’re expecting.”

“Sene,” said her mother.

“What?”

She sighed. “Is that why you did not bring him with you? You thought we would turn him away? This man that you _clearly_ love.”

“I don’t—that is part of it.”

“What is the rest of it then?”

“We’ve been through a lot,” said Sene, scratching hard at her scalp. “It was all really fast, in the end. It got complicated. We needed some time, and I needed to be here. And I didn’t want to make things worse by bringing him along and subjecting him to this…place.”

“This _place_?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I’m certain I don’t,” said her mother. “Do you care at all where you came from, Isene? Your roots? Or have they gone with your vallaslin?”

Sene waved her off. “Please. That was my choice. It had nothing to do with you.”

“Oh yes. I know.”

“I’m really not in the mood to talk about this right now,” said Sene.

“Which part?”

“The vallaslin. What’s done is done.”

“Fair enough,” said her mother.

“Thank you.”

They were quiet for a while. The outside was all full of little blue, freckled noises. Nature was big up here on the Minanter River. Children and eagles and wild turkeys. Sene looked around. She assessed the kitchen, the wood-burning stove, the towels made of pretty linens in all different colors of the sun. There were statues and symbols everywhere, some of them shrines to Mythal.

“So,” said her mother, gripping her mug with two hands, but not drinking.

“Yes?”

“This man.”

Sene sighed. “Solas.”

“Solas,” her mother went on.

"Yes.”

“Was he—? Nevermind.” She took a sip.

“Was he what? Just say it.”

“Was he you’re first, Isene?”

“My first?”

“Yes.” She sighed. “Your _first._ I mean, you are wearing his clothes. You live together. I can only assume that you—”

“Yes,” said Sene. “Yes. Please. He was. Can we not?”

“I’m sorry,” said her mother, exhaling, her freckled cheeks very red. “I just—I was curious, Sene. You’ve been gone for so long. You write home about this man. He is older than you. You’re so different. You are traveling around with human mages and personal armies. Your face, everything. I just want to understand what happened. I know I cannot have everything, but perhaps just a little? Believe it or not, I am not trying to judge you, or your relationship. Now, your father is a different story, and we’ll deal with that as it makes itself known. But if Solas is this important to you, then we should meet him. So, perhaps next time. All right?”

Sene was surprised. Her mother was a little sad there in her Dalish kitchen: outsider wife of the Archivist, mother of the head huntress and now the Inquisitor. It was to be expected. But she also seemed, somehow, renewed. She was happy that Sene was home. Genuinely happy, and she was glad to discard whatever arbitrary attachments she’d held to their previous life if it meant spending a small amount of time with her wayward daughter. She only wanted to understand.

“All right," said Sene.

“You look surprised," said her mother. “Is everything okay?”

"What?" said Sene.

"I asked if everything was okay."

"Oh," said Sene. "Everything is fine. But I have to go."

“Go where?”

“I have to find Morrigan.”

“That’s the little one, right?”

This almost made Sene laugh. “Yes, the little one.”

“You know she brought us a bunch of knitted things,” said her mother, reaching for the needle and thread, resuming her task of mending those trousers. “Hats and scarves. Mittens. An odd gesture, but a gesture no less.”

“Morrigan knits a lot,” said Sene. “She uses it to clear her mind.”

“She seems like a good person,” said her mother. She broke a piece of thread with her teeth. “I know the people here will give her shit, because she is many things that they do not approve of. But that is their problem, not yours.”

“Thank you,” said Sene.

“Of course.” She smiled, reserved. She seemed to sense that Sene was keeping a secret, but she would not ask directly. That was not her way. “Any reason you need Morrigan, in particular?”

Sene was lost in the dreamy curtains. How they were a little see-through. She knew her mother had sewn them herself. She felt restless. “Inquisition stuff,” she said. “I thought of something, just now. I don’t want to forget.”

“Okay,” said her mother. “Lunch is in about an hour. Tell Ellas to bring one of those new Rosés from the cellar, when you see him.”

“I will,” said Sene. She tried to smile.

Sene had always liked pink wine. It was not something that they ever had at Skyhold. Since leaving home, she'd only ever seen it at the Winter Palace and in Val Royeaux. She didn't know how they made it that way, _pink_. She was a huntress, not a vintner. But as usual, the mystery enchanted her in ways she could not explain and only made her love it more.

 

After lunch, Sene went with Morrigan and Cassandra to the shade of a large willow tree. It was late day. Kieran stayed with Sene’s mother who was routinely delighted by his presence. He’d found a skinny green snake in the garden, and she was helping him now to tame it in a small terrarium. She had taught him many elvhen words, and here and there, he would say one, just for a thrill. Morrigan, fluent, had apparently held an entire conversation with Ellas on their walk through the vineyard—about the Ansburg winters and his particular Dalish methodology for tilling the soil. Cassandra just liked the scenery. For every step that she took, she was more and more reminded of home. For as much of a tomboy as she was, her good breeding had taught her many things about manners, and she said very little. Aside from with Sene and Morrigan, she only spoke when spoken to.

The tree was at the top of a green hill. It was high up and you could see a large stretch of the farm—all twenty-two houses and a great many tents. The Lavellans were a combination of several clans, and some still preferred to make their homes in the encampment. A little ways off, they could hear a couple of vintners arguing over what to do in the event of rot in one of the fields below. These were serious men of alcohol. Their skin cracked, their lips dry, their hands huge and untamed by their reality. These men all wore straw hats in the early winter sun, and gloves, and suspenders, and they kicked around like mules standing on their hind legs. Winter in Ansburg was a friendly creature. Nothing went to rest completely. There was very little snow. The winter crop was slower, less agile than the summer, and this just meant you had a lot of stressed out farmers on your hands. Elves in the fields. Elves in the cellars. Just as Cassandra had said, the Lavellan compound was bustling and a place to behold

Sene was leaning against the tree trunk now with both Morrigan and Cassandra sitting across from her, wearing their pretty tunics. Morrigan nodded along as Sene told her everything she had told Cassandra that morning. She was a very good listener and so rarely made a face that would make you feel as if you'd been judged.

When Sene finally finished, she had her face in her hands. Morrigan sighed.

“I am not Solas,” she said.

“Obviously,” said Sene, looking up.

Morrigan studied her, her eyes accentuated by the yellow of the tunic in a dreamy way. “I only meant that Solas can read minuscule shifts in your energies simply by looking at you. He can probably feel them from miles away.”

“Is that what it is like for you, with Kieran?” said Cassandra.

“Yes,” said Morrigan. “More or less.”

“So you can’t tell me?” said Sene. “There’s no way for me to find out for sure?”

“No, I can tell you,” said Morrigan. “It just may take a moment.”

Sene almost lost her breath.

"Are you all right?" said Morrigan.

“Yes," said Sene. "Sorry. I just don’t really know how to feel right now."

“Did you tell your mother?” said Cassandra. “About what’s going on?”

“No,” said Sene, playing with the hem of her dress. “No. She is trying really hard, but she’s not prepared for this.”

"And how prepared are you?” said Morrigan.

Sene looked up at the pretty insides of that willow tree. There were doves somewhere, mourning in time with the winter. “What was it like?” she said to Morrigan. “When you found out?”

“I did not find out until I was on my hands and knees, throwing up into a mass of blackberry bramble somewhere in the Exalted Planes,” said Morrigan. “Months along. Matthew was already gone.”

Sene swallowed hard. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“That is the past,” said Morrigan. “This is the present. Do not apologize for what has already come and gone. And in any case, this is not about me, it is about you.”

“I’m not prepared,” said Sene. “I’ll never be until I know.”

“Very well,” said Morrigan. “This might be easier if you lie down. I know it may be difficult, but try to relax.”

Sene nodded and scooted forward until she was flat on her back in the grass. She gave Morrigan her hand and closed her eyes.

"Think of something simple,” said Morrigan. “Soothing.”

“Like what?”

“Like the sea. Like a yellow sailboat.”

Sene said okay. But the truth was, she did not know how to picture those things. Sene’s brain had never previously been the kind of brain that pictured sailboats. She usually hated twisting her mind in on itself and so rarely held moments of complete and utter stillness, especially not when she was alone. She tended to shut things out rather than let them in, with everything but Solas. So she listened to the vintners on the other side of the hill instead. Their frenetic talking was like hypnosis. One of them swore and threw his hat. The other cursed on behalf of the Dread Wolf. _The Dread Wolf is not real,_ she wanted to say. _The Dread Wolf is not real._ And yet, it was all just a great game, wasn’t it? Who gives a shit.

“Sene,” said Morrigan at some point. It was unclear how much time had passed.

Sene opened her eyes. She thought she felt a bug in her hair. "What," she said. "What is it."

“There is nothing,” said Morrigan.

This brought her to the surface. She turned her head to look at Morrigan who seemed entirely untouched by the ceremony. “Nothing?” said Sene.

“You are in stasis. You are not pregnant.”

“What does stasis mean?”

“That is how this works. Your energies are undisturbed. If you were pregnant, they would have changed.”

“Do you mean I’m not pregnant anymore, or I never was?”

Morrigan shrugged. “I can feel the scar,” she said, still holding her hand in a sort of big sister fashion. “From what happened before, in the Emprise du Lion. But all is healed now, Sene, and nothing more. It seems that you are simply…late.”

Cassandra squeezed her hand. “I told you,” she said.

 _Late,_ she said.

 _I told you,_ she said.

“Are you relieved?” said Morrigan. "Sene?"

Sene stayed lying down in the green grass. She turned her head and saw a worm, half-dried from the sun. The vintners had gone. Perhaps she had actually been prepared this time. She just didn’t know how or why or for which part.

 

Later on, after Morrigan and Kieran and Cassandra were all in their guest bedrooms fast asleep, Sene went outside, and she wandered into the tree line and lie down in the cold grass, as she had often done when she was a girl. It poked her neck and got into her hair, and overhead, there were ten million stars, like fireflies and Solas’s magic, all mixed up together in a dream. She realized then that she did not understand this place, its politics and distractions. Solas would have understood, but why did it matter? At some point that afternoon, she had begun to earnestly wonder what she was supposed to do next. When you meet a boy you love, so young, would he be there forever? After the willow tree, Morrigan had taken Sene on a walk through the lemon grove.

 _I do believe the elves here are suspicious of me,_ she said.

 _If only they knew,_ said Sene.

 _Our lives are not like the lives of others,_ said Morrigan. _We live in constant motion._

_Does it always have to be like that?_

Morrigan looked at her, sadly as the sun went down past the tree line. _No. No, I do not believe it does.  
_

And Sene realized how in control she was. And that the night was long but gleaming.

 

Back at Skyhold, Solas entered Cullen’s office with a splitting headache. He sat down across from the Commander at his desk and was handed a strong cup of coffee by a scout who promptly left the room.

Solas gave Cullen a look.

“You looked like you could use that,” said Cullen.

“Thank you.”

“Do you have any idea of why I’ve asked you here, Solas?”

“None at all,” said Solas. “I’m completely baffled.”

“We received word this morning that Sene has arrived safely at her clan’s compound in Ansburg.”

Solas nodded, once, had a bit of coffee, then set the cup down on the desk. “And?”

“Now that she’s officially crossed the Waking Sea, her borders of jurisdiction have become…fuzzy. Not to mention the fact that she’s out of direct contact. Her home matter must come first. Do you agree?”

“I do.”

“I thought you would. Before Sene left, I had her make me a list,” said Cullen. He opened a very thin file on the desk in front of him. “I’ve got it right here.”

“What kind of list,” said Solas.

"A chain of command. You’re at the top.”

“Excuse me?”

“Acting Inquisitor,” said Cullen. “Can you handle that?”

Solas sat back in his chair. He was thirsty and stupified. The chair creaked, loudly. “This is the first I am hearing of this.”

“That is between you and Sene,” said Cullen. “I’m just the one with the list.”

“Who is next on this list?”

“After you?”

“Yes.”

“Cassandra. Though Cassandra is obviously out of the running.”

“Who is after Cassandra.”

“Me. Then Dorian, then Leliana.”

“And you do not want that mantle?” said Solas.

“Not in a thousand years,” said Cullen. “Of course, I would do it if she asked. But I know my limits.”

“Your limits?”

“Solas,” said Cullen, leaning forward with his elbows on the desk. A very big man. “You are the Inquisitor’s closest confidant. You have advised her on every single major decision she’s made since the explosion at the conclave and the Inquisition’s inception at Haven. You understand her code better than anyone. Her priorities. Not to mention the fact that you seem to have a great deal of experience with diplomacy and complex negotiation. I agree with this.”

“You don’t think it is a conflict of interest?” said Solas.

“Not at all,” said Cullen. “You’ve both proven to be worthy professionals. And it is only for a short while. A few months, at most.”

Solas sighed. “Months,” he said. “This is my duty, in her absence.”

“At least for now. Do you have any questions?”

“No,” said Solas. “Nevermind. I can handle the responsibility. Just keep me advised.”

“Very well,” said Cullen, closing the file in front of him. This seemed to put a cap on the morning. “I’ll have the paperwork drawn up as soon as possible. We’ll have the grounds notified, and the troops, and any major dignitaries, as seen fit by Josephine.”

Solas nodded.

“In the meantime,” said Cullen, “there have been some developments, per Leliana’s investigation into our elven assassins in the Emprise du Lion. I thought you should know. They are rather…convoluted.”

“Convoluted?” said Solas. “In what way?”

“She got two of them talking,” said Cullen. “It’s rather remarkable, really. There is only one source they each seem to have in common.”

“What is that source?” said Solas.

“The Qun,” said Cullen, steel-like. Almost a question.

“The Qun?”

“Yes,” said Cullen. “The Qun. Rather strange, don’t you think? Like a bad dream.”

“Very bad,” said Solas. “If it is true.”

“ _If_.”

 

That night, in the Fade, Solas found Sene waiting for him. It was genuinely her. She did not know what she was doing, and yet, she was doing it anyway. She had somehow summoned him here. Her subconscious, alive and fully tapped, he found her sitting on a pier hanging out over some endless, sky-silver body of water, thinking. Beautiful. Wearing a green dress. Her hair was braided down her back, and she was making him think of the autumn. Red trees. This was her dream, not his.

He sat down beside her. “Vhenan,” he said.

She looked up. She was surprised. “Solas?”

“Yes.”

“Are we in the Fade?”

“Yes.”

“How did I get here?”

Solas shrugged. “You called out to me,” he said. “I could feel you. I just followed.”

“I did this?”

“Yes, you did. I am quite impressed.”

She smiled. “Weird.”

He put his arm around her. Easy. They looked out at the water. There was a sailboat with a yellow sail, like a fin, vibrating in and out of the distance. Sene watched it go by. She seemed lost in something, but she also seemed okay.

“I miss you,” she said eventually, and that was all. She put her head on his shoulder. Her hair smelled like the grass.

"I miss you, vhenan,” he said. His voice was deep and without ending. They sat there, watching the yellow sailboat of Sene’s dreams. You could hear the water, lapping at the shore behind them. Pebbles, sand, sky, and the open sea. Together now, they spoke of nothing so complicated as the day.


	45. Lavellan Family Values

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Certain developments begin to take shape, for both Solas and Sene. Mythal ponders her purpose. Sene's father has many questions.

_1  
_

She stood with her brown leather boots on the stone of the blacksmith’s shop in Ansburg. This was a lumpy porch, overgrown with vines. The orange flowers that usually grew here were sucked tight into their hiding places, but the vines grew everywhere. Winter had come like a little beast, eating all the bright things. Sene still loved this place. It was called _Hart’s Metals_ and this made her feel warm inside even as she knew that he was gone, because it was a place of legacy that she remembered very well. She looked at Cassandra and then knocked on the door. The city was quiet behind them. It had rained during the night and now everything was covered in a sheen. The world was brown and wet, ten thousand puddles and sandbags stacked along the yards and the storefronts to keep the floors and carpets dry. The air was colder today. Sene wore a jacket that went down past her knees, and Cassandra, unprepared, had had to borrow one off of Sene's mother.

“Lucky for me, the Lavellans are not small women,” she had said as they left the house late that morning. Sene liked the calm, alternate thinking that Cassandra brought to her life. She did not overcomplicate matters of the mind or heart and seemed to live on the edge of every moment, exactly like Sene. Only she dealt with this practically, and the shocks of life never seemed to take her by surprise. She was older and wiser but still girlish in ways that made her seem wide open. Sene hoped to be like her some day. Not Divine, but more aware and settled. She wondered what made Cassandra anxious in the night, or if she felt anxious at all, and what that must be like, to live with all your troubles behind you, having settled them cleanly in an unlocked chest. Accessible but stored out of sight, contents all labeled and accounted for. She thought of Solas but only briefly. She saw his muscled back in her mind and how it still seemed to her that he could carry anything.

Morrigan had not wanted to leave the compound that morning. The rain seemed to make her uneasy, so she gave Sene a calm smile and stayed inside the house with Kieran drinking tea, and that day she would teach him more of the elvhen language and when that became boring, the two of them would tell stories and then he would fall asleep on the chair by the window. This was the most time she had spent with her son at a stretch since he was a little baby, and Sene could see this. It seemed to mean a lot to her. Meanwhile, Sene’s mother, Rasha, was helping Ellas in the vineyard, as that night, there would be a family dinner, welcoming home her father and Keeper Deshanna from their quest in Wycome. Sene was not excited for this, and this came with a lot of guilt materializing as dread as well as the quiet certainty that, in some ways, life would be a lot easier if they were gone.

A young woman came to the door of Hart's Metals. She was probably Sene’s age, a little older perhaps, and she wore a heart-shaped locket and a long, gray dress adorned with lovely bits of jewels and gold. She was muscled but small and had short brown hair. This was the blacksmith’s daughter. Sene could see it immediately in her face, and the women could see something in hers, too, and when she saw the two of them there on the porch she said right away, “Sene Lavellan.”

“Yes,” said Sene. “This is my friend Cassandra Pentaghast. How did you know it was me?”

“The hair,” she said. “It is nice to finally meet you, and your friend.”

“Are you his daughter?”

She nodded. “Brenda,” said the woman, relieved, but somehow saddened. “Won’t you please come in, Sene and Cassandra?”

The shop was exactly as Sene had remembered save for a few feminine touches here and there: new curtains and a beautiful, blue teapot and some winter berries growing in apothecary jars in the windows. The place was clean and cool. Shelves of ingots and great, epic weapons mounted to velvet planks on the walls. There were racks and racks of swords and pieces of swords and hilts for swords and also smaller, lesser known things like leather gloves and leather helmets, aprons, and a great deal of flatware in wicker baskets, pots and pans stacked up and for sale by the set. The shop looked like it was in operating order, but the sign on the door had said _Closed._

They hung their coats on the rack and went inside to the kitchen, which was hidden in a little room behind the storefront. Brenda had prepared tea and poured them each a cup, and each cup sat delicately on a saucer, and there were small plates lined with paper doilies and snacks of sandwiches and scones in the shapes of birds, and this was a woman who understood the job and manners of a hostess. Sene knew that Josephine would have been impressed and she, herself, was impressed as well.

“Your table is lovely,” said Cassandra. “The pattern on the china—It is Nevarran, is it not?”

“Yes, it is,” said Brenda, spreading a napkin into her lap. “I do a lot of traveling for the shop, research. My father liked to keep his methods varied.”

“Are you a blacksmith like he was?” said Sene.

“Yes, and no,” said Brenda. “He taught me a great deal of the trade. Weaponry fascinates me, but I don’t like the work.”

“You like the history,” said Cassandra. “The culture.”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“The shop is in excellent condition,” said Sene. “I never saw it this clean growing up.”

Brenda smiled into her tea. “Yes, well. I’m glad it is to your liking, Sene.” She became pensive then, set down her cup before drinking. “Would you prefer that I call you Inquisitor?”

“No. Please just call me Sene.”

“Very well,” said Brenda. “Sene. Do you know why I have asked you to come here?”

“Only that he left me something, in his will. That is what my mother said in her letter.”

“I know you must be very busy,” said Brenda. “News of the Inquisition has reached our ears this far to the north, obviously. We were glad to see the business with the civil war settled. Plus, the threat of another Blight had many people anxious, even in the Marches. I cannot thank you enough for taking the time to come see me.”

“It was no trouble,” said Sene. “Honestly. Of course I came.”

“I noticed ten or eleven soldiers stationed outside the shop. Does that ever get tiresome?”

“All the time,” said Sene. “There are fifty more, invisible plants on every street corner of the city, I assure you, observing my surroundings and every move.”

They each sipped their tea.

“Well,” said Brenda, “Then I suppose we should get to the matter at hand.”

“What is it?” said Sene.

“This shop. I have been running it on leftover inventory for about a month in my father’s absence, but that was never my intention, or his. I am a married woman, and my husband and I are trying to have a child. I have no desire to smith. We live outside the city, not far from the Lavellan compound. My father’s will stipulates that the shop is under my care, but that its ownership be entrusted to you, and you alone.”

“Me?” said Sene.

“Yes, you. This shop is yours, if you’ll have it.”

Sene looked around. She was baffled. “He left me his shop?” she said. “But why?”

“He followed the Inquisition closely,” said Brenda. She got up then, and went to the kitchen counter. She picked up a heavy leather bound book. It had collected a bit of dust. “He would have joined himself if it weren’t for his health. But he was very proud to have known you. See? He kept record of all your successes. I think he sees this as his…contribution. After all these years.”

Brenda cleared a space on the table, and Cassandra helped, spilling a little tea over the edge of her cup. This seemed to embarrass her. Brenda took no notice, sat down and put the book in front of Sene. The book was full of clippings from various posts from all corners of Thedas, all news per the Inquisition. The headlines were grandiose. _Redheaded Inquisitor Vanquishes Dragon, Saves Whole Community in Crestwood. Dalish Inquisitor takes Halamshiral by Storm. Inquisition Quells Blight Fears. Inquisition Brings Peace to the Exalted Planes. Warden Plot Revealed, Dealt with Bravely by Inquisition. Elven Inquisitor Appears at Party in Val Royeaux. Inquisition on Village Tour of Southern Thedas, Dalish Elves Unite in Pilgrimage._ There were dozens.

The latest was a recent headline from the Ansburg Post: _Lavellans Leverage Inquisition Ties, Take Business to Ferelden._

Sene closed the book. Her heart became raw. This was news to her. She just rested her chin in her hands in a kind of mourning that, in the moment, felt very real but she knew was neither here nor there. She closed her eyes, gathered her focus.

“Sene?” said Cassandra. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” she said, looking up. “I am fine.”

“I hope you’re not surprised by this,” said Brenda. “My father made it seem like you were quite close.”

“We were,” she said. “It’s just been so long since I’ve been home. Would you mind—what happened to him, Brenda?”

Brenda looked down at her tea, the pretty amber liquid. “He had been ill for some time,” she said. “Cancer, in his lungs. He was terrible about healers. It was not sudden, and his pain was no greater than what had always been typical for him.” She picked up the book and brought it back to the counter. “I’m not sure whether that’s good or bad.” Then, she leaned against the counter and bit off a hangnail. She closed her eyes. “Do you want the shop, Sene?” she said. “If not, please tell me now.”

Sene looked at her hands. Outside, it had begun to rain again. You could hear the pitter-patter on the tin roof and a couple of mourning doves as they took off from the gutter and flew away. “This is a huge gift,” she said after a while. “Of course, I accept. I can’t run it myself, but I know how to find people who can.”

Brenda’s relief filled the room like hummingbirds. She came back and sat down, and she dropped a cube of sugar into her cup. “Thank you, Sene. This would mean the world to him,” she said. “It will take a week or so to get the paperwork in order, but—I would love it if you stayed for dinner tonight. My husband will be here in about an hour. He is a fisherman, up the river. I plan to cook.”

Sene glance at Cassandra, who was idly stirring her tea with a dainty, silver spoon, watching the rain on the window. “Thank you, Brenda,” said Sene. “But my parents have a dinner planned tonight as well. You and your husband are more than welcome to join us.”

Smiling now, Brenda shook out her head, like a little shiver had gone through. She folded her hands and looked at the table cloth. “No offense,” she said, “Sene Lavellan, because you seem like a very nice woman, especially given your mantle as Inquisitor, but I am more than a little intimidated by your clan. Too intimidated for casual dining, at least. Perhaps next year.”

Sene laughed at this, but for a moment, she wasn’t sure whether it had been out loud or just inside her own head. In any case, she finished her tea, lukewarm, and she got up to have one more look around the place with Brenda, daughter of the kind, dead blacksmith of Ansburg, and she was sad, but she thought about how, as a sanctuary, there could have been worse places growing up. The kindness of blacksmiths. There can be happiness here, and there can be peace, too, thought Sene. And sanctuary. Even in the saddest goodbyes.

You just have to go to it, she was figuring out. If there was anything she had learned over the past year, it was that, if you want something, you have to go to it yourself. The world holds very little interest in meeting you halfway.

 

_2  
_

Mythal was in the Undercroft, watching Sera sketch. Dagna was not around yet. She had gone to run an errand in the Arbor Wilds, retrieving bits and pieces from the ruins of Mythal's old Well for experiments. Mythal had granted her blessing, as the Well was a relic now, and nothing more. For whatever reason, she had been spending a lot of time in the Undercroft, doing nothing but listening. She found Sera and Dagna to be wholly fascinating in their ability to talk for hours about nothing at all, and yet to always be talking. Being with them, it was easy. It made her feel less useless for about an hour or so at a stretch. At that point, she would have to leave. Find something else to do.

For ten years, Mythal’s only woman friend had been Solas’s mother Leanathy, who was a great deal older than her and wiser and always sort of looked upon Mythal with a slight air of suspicion, and this colored their conversations as impermanent. Mythal did not blame her for this. In fact, she blamed herself, and it was still a piece of the past that woke her in the night, forcing her out of safe dreaming until she found herself scratching again at that itchy patch on her arm. She would just look out the window of the alcove and up at the moon, in longing.

Each morning, she wished she had some place to be. She missed Arlathan, but it was dead, and it had been dead since even before, and so like so many of her thoughts these days, this was irrelevant. Bull had given her some kind of salve for the scratchy place on her arm, and that seemed to heal the skin very quickly, but this, in some ways, intensified the compusion. She did not understand what it meant, this itchiness, as she had never been taken with such aggressive behavioral ticks in her previous life. And the healers of Skyhold, while clearly qualified, she did not trust, because even if they had known what to do with her, they all seemed to be filled with judgment and business and some vast maternal authority, and these things scared Mythal. They always had.

She saw Solas on rare occasions. Once, they had dinner at the tavern. She asked him questions about his life, and he answered honestly, and then he tried to ask her questions about hers, but he knew everything there was to know. She would wander into the rotunda to watch him paint every couple of mornings, and then she would wander back out again, not a word shared between them. Sometimes a glance, a smile. He once poured her a cup of coffee and left it on the desk, like he had known that she would be there, and exactly what time she would arrive, and she sat and drank it on the couch as he stood painting, way up high on a platform, out of reach. Being with her seemed to cause him pain. He was bored without Sene, but this was something different. Being without Sene did not cause him pain, just restlessness, like he did not know what to with his hands. He became messy, the room unkempt. She saw him drinking too much. It was an old habit, but he had friends here, and he was very good at his job with the Inquisition. Solas had always liked to feel like he had something to offer, a job to do. He was a provider by blood, and somehow, she knew this best of all, even better than he did.

In any case, the gesture with the coffee had taken her by surprise. It was so much like it had used to be, for a moment she had forgotten when she was and she imagined that later that night they would meet in their bedroom that no longer existed and speak on matters that had no depth. They would take off their shoes and their clothes and lie on the bed beneath the stained glass windows, quiet, taking in the moonlight like drugs, and he would be a little distant at first as he came around from the day, but he would come around, because he always came around. He did love her. That was never in question.

Still, somehow, she knew that he was not distant with Sene. That he gave her everything a man had to give and that any distance between them had been closed long ago when she lost his baby in a tragedy that should have never come to pass. Mythal was angry with herself, for how she had treated him all those months back in the Crossroads, when he had come to her simply to talk, almost innocent, in loss of his power, and she had taunted him like some sort of jealous woman. This kind of thing was why they could not be together. This and her death and thousands of years of mourning. She understood now, in solid form. When the brain has matter, the thoughts make more sense. Or at least that’s how it felt to Mythal.

“You are very good at drawing Solas,” said Mythal to Sera, flipping through her sketchbook, tilting it every which way until she got the full picture. They were sitting on the floor together, with a lovely view of the sunlit mists outside. “He has a unique tip of the ear. It sort of curls. You get it here, just right.”

“Yeah, well,” said Sera, “when you spend as much time as I have with the elven man, you start to notice things like _ear tips._ ”

“Yes,” said Mythal. “You do.”

“He told me, you know,” said Sera, getting quiet the way she did. It was girlish, like she was unsure of herself, for just a minute. “That he’s old, like you. That he knew you.”

Mythal looked up. This surprised and worried her. She thought for a moment that Sera might kick her out of the Undercroft, make her give back the alcove. “I'm sorry,” she said.

“Why are you sorry?"

"Shouldn't I be?"

Sera made a sort of funny noise with her tongue. "Fuck no," she said. "He told me this morning. After he told Bull and Dorian, of course. Men. Always stroking each other's...egos. Though I suppose it’s good, right? A man needs…man friends. Or whatever.”

“I see,” said Mythal, her arm itching her again. She made a conscious effort to leave it alone. “Well, I'm sure he was very worried, Sera. Worried about what you might think of him. He values your friendship a great deal.”

“You got me there,” said Sera. “But what’s he got to be so worried for? So he’s old. So what? So he did the Veil thing. Big shit, yeah? Lots of people do stupid stuff and live to regret it. At least his made something good in the end. Like people. Our people. Solas is good people. He was always weird, and powerful, and now it’s just, bigger. Like, he’s the sun. Or something. It doesn’t change how I like him, or what he means to me. We’re friends. Stupid git should know that by now. No trust, that one. I mean, no wonder. Not like I blame him. But still.”

Mythal watched as Sera perfected a line on paper. This sketch was of Sene, smiling. Mythal had never really seen Sene smile, not in person. This made her curious.

“I like the way your brain works, Sera,” she said and closed the sketchbook in her lap.

Sera glanced up, and her cheeks turned pink. She was like a peach. “Nice of you to say that,” she said.

“It’s true.”

Mythal left about thirty minutes later, and she promised to return the next day to say hello to Dagna. She saw Solas in the main hall. He was on his way to the war room from his quarters upstairs, and he looked very tall and very serious, just as he’d used to when it was time to go to work. Solas was one of these men who, in the morning, needed all of his focus in one place and could not be bothered, but when the day was over, broke free from all that and wanted companionship. He had always waited around for her at the end of every day, smoking in her quarters as the moon bloomed up, looking out her window, even when he was very young, just nineteen years old, long before he was a General, long before they ever became intimate. He would then go into the city after she dismissed him, find a girl in a bar somewhere, bring her back, show her card tricks and take her clothes off on his bedroom balcony. Mythal knew most of this, simply by virtue of living with him. The girls were always gone by morning.

Girls were easy for Solas, as you must know by now, and he treasured their company, but this kind of transience left him dissatisfied. He grew impatient as time went by, and he stopped going to the city. A sort of monogamous man, deeply traditional by ancient standards, exactly like his father. He longed for structure, and he longed to be faithful to a single family unit. He liked the idea of being taken care of by a woman especially. He probably saw it as the other way around, but Mythal knew the truth.

That day, in the main hall, she did not approach him. She waited for him to disappear behind the heavy wooden door to the war room, and then she took a walk down to the garden and went to the eluvian, which she would sit with in meditation at least once a day. Listening to the Chantry sisters outside as they watched the children and planted flowers and prayed to the Maker. Thinking about Sera, and her drawings of Solas and Sene. Scratching, scratching. Wondering if Bull would invite her to spar the next day, liking very much the seldom afternoons they spent together. And she prayed to the mirror, searching her mind, the Fade, the endless catalog of her old, sucked-up power for a way to make use of herself again. Solas was living a life that he had chosen, and this was the one thing that, in the time of their reign, she simply could not give him. She could feel the Veil, pressing up against her in its ragged pieces now. It felt like him, smelled like him. She wished there was something she could do to make the time get slow, make the days come undone. She was worried, as she knew it was still all falling apart.

She was Mythal. She had seen everything, and she had seen it all at once. The world was broken, and the man would need help if he was going to stitch it back together again. She was searching, searching. Collecting her memories and putting them together in new ways, trying to find the answers. After all this time, she was still just a collector. Maybe that, in and of itself, was the one thing she still had left to give.

_3_

“Have you spoken to Sene?” said Cullen. They were in the war room. The Commander leaned against the back wall beside a blue and yellow stained-glass window, studying the lucky coin from his pocket.

“Excuse me?” said Solas, leaning over the table on his palms.

Josie glanced up from her clipboard, stacked with a list of visiting dignitaries who had only just arrived that afternoon.

“I mean, you can do that, right?” said Cullen. “While asleep?”

Solas raised his eyebrows.

“Oh, Maker’s Breath,” said Cullen. “I don’t mean to pry. Just ignore me.”

Solas smiled. This was work, apparently. “It’s all right, Commander,” he said. “I’m being an asshole on purpose. I have spoken with Sene. Just last night."

“An asshole on purpose?” said Cullen. “Can we not?”

“As you wish,” said Solas.

Josie rolled her eyes.

“In any case," said Solas, "you should know that the Fade is not a regular means of communication for us. I find her there every once in a while.”

“How is she doing?” said Josie. "Sene."

“She is doing fine,” said Solas, straightening up, hands in his pockets. It was sunny that day in the mountains, the light coming through the narrow windows in dusty little bars. “Today she is in Ansburg, discussing the terms of her late friend’s will. There is a dinner planned for tonight, I believe. With her family. Nothing earth-shattering.”

“Her family,” said Josie. “Ah. I have been meaning to discuss them with you Solas.”

“The Lavellans?”

“Yes."

"What have they done?"

"They have recently purchased a large plot of farm land outside Highever,” she said. “Several hundred acres, at least. They used Sene’s mantle and the Inquisition’s brand to leverage a better price. For as much as I admire their business savvy, they did this without informing us ahead of time, which is…complicated. The Lavellan name carries a lot of weight in the Free Marches, and our noble allies in the Stormlands have been taken by surprise. They are now asking questions. Some of them view it as encroachment.”

“It will be sure to piss off Sene,” said Solas, oddly underwhelmed. “She’ll view it as her family meddling in her territory. But that is personal.”

“Personal, indeed. I have yet to find a way to spin this to the Inquisition’s unique advantage.”

“You could use some sort of _unity_ message,” said Solas. “Dalish elves profiting off the Inquisition should be a public relations boon. There are worse legacies.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“I can speak with the concerned parties myself, if you think that would help at all,” said Solas, studying his right hand briefly, then putting it away. “Though I believe Sene should see to the matter privately. Especially with her clan involved. She puts a certain face on the Inquisition, makes it seem less…threatening.”

Josie scribbled something down and then sighed, setting down the clipboard and sweeping the hair off her face in dramatic fashion. “It is on the agenda.”

Solas nodded. “How is Thom?” he said. “I haven’t seen him at the tavern in almost a week.”

“A lot of carpentry of late,” she said. “He’s been drinking in the stables, bored out of his mind.”

“Do the two of you have plans for tonight?”

“None at all,” said Josie. “Please, usurp his attention, Solas. I’ve got my hands full with the Stormlands, _as well as_ the Berrandes, and I’m sure he would greatly appreciate your company.”

“What’s going on with the Berrandes?” said Cullen.

She glanced at Solas, a little nervous. “They’ve invited Sene and Solas to yet another of their elegant soirees in Val Royeaux.”

Solas squeezed his eyes shut.

“It is certainly no obligation,” said Josie. “Of course, any dalliance the two of you have with the two of them greatly improves our relations with the Imperial court.”

“When?” said Solas.           

“Not for several months.”

“Sene will take convincing.”

“I’ll leave that to you.”

He sighed.

“Have you given any more thought to our lead in Kirkwall, Solas?” said Cullen. “Leliana will be back tomorrow morning with a full report. Though if it is Fenris, we have quite a bit of leverage.”

“I have no problem investigating myself.”

“You should take Varric,” said Josie. “And perhaps Thom as well.”

Solas smirked. “He truly is bored, isn’t he?”

“I cannot even begin to describe.”

“I can prepare the cavalry for Kirkwall as soon as the end of the week,” said Cullen, “though it is up to you Solas. How would you like to proceed?”

Solas studied the map. He needed something to chew on. “That’s very soon,” he said.

“Yes, but if we drag our heels, given his reputation, Fenris may already be gone by the time we get there.”

“Isn’t he there with Hawke?”

“Hawke will go with him,” said Josie. “They are…wanderers. So to speak.”

Solas sighed, torn. He leaned over the table once again. His head felt much better today. Being with Sene—it had cleansed him. Gotten the gunk off the back of his brain so he could see straight. “All right,” he said. “Begin the preparations. I’ll take Dorian and Bull. Thom as well. Varric's presence should precede our arrival. I'd like to gain this man's trust, if at all possible.”

“Very good,” said Cullen, pocketing the coin.

“In the meantime,” said Josephine, “I will be in touch with the Berrandes and tell them that you accept their invitation, under the pretense of possible cancellation, per your duties to the Inquisition, of course.”

“That is fine,” said Solas. “Is there anything else?”

“No,” said Josie, stretching out her back. “For the time being, at least, we are finished.”

Solas took a deep breath then. He made eye contact with them both.

They each sort of looked at each other. There was a moment.

“Solas?” said Cullen. “Is there something else?”

“There is,” said Solas, hands deep in his pockets. He looked down at his shoes. “A matter of some personal urgency that I need to discuss with the two of you. In the interest of full disclosure.”

“Full disclosure?” said Josie. “Regarding what?”

The room was quiet, almost trance-like. "Who I am," he said, serious. "Or, more specifically, who I was."

"Who you were _when_?" said Josie.

"Should we be concerned?" said Cullen.

"No," said Solas. "Well...no. I am not a criminal. Just, I need you to believe anything that I tell you. I need you to trust me. Can you do that?"

Josie scoffed.

"Of course," said Cullen.

"Please, Solas," said Josie. "There is nothing you could do or say at this point that could cause us to question your commitment to the Inquisition. Get on with it."

Solas smirked. "Very well," he said. It should not have been this easy. Alas.

 

_4_

“So,” said Sene’s father. He was a tall, stern man with dark blue eyes and a thick head of black hair, sitting at the head of the table in the family dining room. Revasan Lavellan, Clan Archivist. A writer by any other name. Sene sat to his right, while Rasha, Sene’s redheaded mother, sat to his left.

“Did you know about the land deal in Ferelden?” said Sene.

He blinked. “Excuse me?”

“Isene,” said Rasha. Silverware clanking to porcelain. "We do not discuss business at the dinner table."

Sene gave her a look. To her mother’s left was Ellas, and next to him, Terys, Ellas’s son and Sene’s cousin, a hunter, and eighteen years old. Cassandra and Morrigan were on the other side of Sene, sharing a bottle of red wine between them. Every vallaslin at the table belonged to Mythal.

“Where is Deshanna,” said Sene. “I thought he was supposed to be here.”

“He had a headache from the trip,” said Rasha, biting into a carrot. “He sends his apologies.”

"Right,” said Sene. “A headache. This has nothing to do with the fact that he used my name to purchase four hundred acres of discount farmland in Highever and never told me. He must be working on his spin.”

“Sene,” said Revasan. “Save it.”

“I, personally, didn’t know about the land deal,” said Ellas, picking his teeth with the tip of a sharp knife. “Just heard about it today. But I say, more farm, more money. Can’t we agree on that, Ise?” He gave her kind of this sly smile that made her want to slap him across the face.

"Sometimes, Ellas," she said, "I would like to slap you across your face."

Rasha cleared her throat. Ellas laughed. Sene took a very large sip of wine. The food was good—white fish and root vegetables—but she didn’t have much of an appetite.

“I hear you have a boyfriend,” said her father, a little while later, out of nowhere.

“Rather abrupt,” said Sene. She glared at him and then then glared at her mother. “I see we’re wasting no time.”

“He asked,” said Rasha.

“He asked if I had a boyfriend?”

“I did,” said Revasan.

“And what else did you ask?” said Sene. “Whether he was a Dalish squint?”

“Sene, for the love,” said Rasha.

“I simply asked after his existence,” said Revasan. “You tell me so little. I already know that he is not Dalish. That is not what this is about.”

“And how do you know he is not Dalish?” she said. “Did Deshanna tell you, steered by his crack team of Dalish spies?”

“Your mother told me.”

“So you didn’t know until when, yesterday?”

“This morning.”

There was a brief silence. Ellas offered Cassandra more wine. She smiled, nodded politely. Morrigan glanced at her wrist, brought it to her nose, as if she somehow missed the smell of her own perfume. Kieran was already asleep. This dinner was for adults only.

“I hear he’s tall,” said Revasan after a little while, holding his silverware out in front of him like a man of high decorum. “This man.”

"He _is_ tall,” said Sene. “His name is Solas.”

"How tall?"

"Tall."

Terys cleared his throat, leaned toward Sene, over the table. “I hear he once punched a red lyrium Templar in the face.”

Everybody looked to see what the hell he was talking about. Cassandra stifled a laugh into her wine. “Pardon me,” she said.

“He what?” said Revasan.

“He punched a red templar in the face,” said Terys.

Sene finished her wine, poured herself another.

"Is it true?" said Terys.

“He injured his hand very badly that day,” said Morrigan. “In the Arbor Wilds. 'Twas not pretty.”

“Shit." Terys had black hair, a lot like Sene’s father. A whole shitload of freckles. Pretty blue eyes like the sea. “Is it also true then that he conjured some sort of huge, mutant butterfly and scared a comte in Val Royeaux?”

“A comte in Val Royeaux?” said Rasha.

“ _That_ is not true,” said Sene. “It was not a mutant butterfly.”

“But it was a butterfly?”

Sene sighed.

“What about the dragon?” said Terys.

“The dragon?” said Sene. “Which dragon?”

Terys gave her a look. “There’s been more than one?”

“Yes,” said Sene. “There have been several.”

“Fuck,” said Terys, putting away a huge forkful of potatoes. “The stories about him are…crazy.”

“How do you know all of this?” said Revasan.

Terys shrugged, took a sip of his wine. “I read the gossip columns in the post.”

“These stories,” said Morrigan, drinking deeply from a glass of red wine, “are mostly plants by the Inquisition in order to remedy his reputation as an elven apostate. They are mostly gossip. Solas is an elegant man and a powerful mage of extremely high intelligence. Sene has done well for herself.”

“Thank you, Morrigan,” said Sene.

"So he didn't punch a red templar in the face?" said Rasha, genuinely curious.

"No," said Morrigan. "He did."

“What kind of mage is he?” said Revasan.

Sene rolled her eyes.

“What?” said Revasan. “Is that such a terrible question to ask?”

“He does rift magic,” said Terys. He was bright and true. He did not like quarrels. He liked elfroot, and girls in red dresses. “He can pull matter out of the Fade. Right, Ise?”

Ellas clapped his hand to the young man’s shoulder. “I think my boy has a crush.”

“It’s not a crush,” said Terys. “It’s just fascinating.”

“Solas is a rift mage,” said Sene, nodding. “Morrigan can explain.”

“What’s a rift mage?” said Rasha. "Lady Morrigan, if you do not mind."

Morrigan was tending to one of the silver buttons on her blouse. “It just means that he holds a great deal of power over the Veil,” she said.

“What kind of power,” said Revasan.

“He walks in dreams,” said Morrigan. “An old skill, all but nonexistent for modern mages. This allows him to access the Fade in ways that few can comprehend, and that includes rift magic.”

“He walks in dreams?” said Rasha. “I thought that was just myth.”

Sene was staring straight ahead. She was counting the candles as they flickered on the walls.

“It is,” said Morrigan. “Myth based in truth. It literally means that his consciousness can enter the Fade at will. He does not require lyrium to do so.”

“That's so odd,” said Rasha. "But sort of beautiful."

“It sounds like blood magic,” said Revasan.

Morrigan smiled. “I assure you that it is not blood magic.”

“So," said Revasan, straightening up in his chair. "He is a tall rift mage who punches red lyrium abominations in the face and walks in dreams." He looked to Sene. "What else is there?”

“What else would you like to know?” said Sene, sticking her fork into the piece of fish on her plate, mashing it into a paste. She was not very good at diplomacy. "That he is a thirty-something apostate who took my virginity? Or shall we continue to discuss the matter of his height and physical aggression? Either one is fine with me.”

Ellas laughed so hard at this, he spit a bit of wine on the tablecloth. Terys’s jaw nearly fell out of his head.

“Oh, Isene,” said Rasha. She put her head in her hands.

Cassandra and Morrigan were very quiet. Sene was quite pleased with herself.

Meanwhile, Revasan simply wiped his mouth with his napkin and put it back in his lap. His jaw was set.

“What’s your problem?” said Sene.

“That was unnecessary,” said Revasan.

“Yes, well. You _asked._ ”

“Where is this man?” he said, abrupt but in control.

“Excuse me?”

“Solas. Right now. If he is this important to you, so important that you must feel the need to cause massive disruptions to our family dinner, then where is he?”

“Massive disruptions?” said Sene.

“Answer the question.”

“He is at Skyhold,” she said, growing defensive. “He wanted to come. He brought it up to me months ago. I am the one who asked him to stay behind.”

“Why?”

“Because I was worried,” she said, pushing back from the table, loudly, but she did not get up.

“About what.”

“About this. The questions. All the bullshit. Perhaps you don’t know this, father, but I’ve had a pretty fucked-up year since Deshanna sent me to that conclave. I’m not terribly eager to watch as you and, let’s face it, he, attempt to shit all over the man who helped me see it through, beginning to end.”

“Please do not leave the table, Sene,” said Revasan.

“I wanted to bring him here,” she said. “I will bring him here. But I have to know that you’ll—”

“That I’ll what?”

"That you’ll accept him. That you won’t be a total fucking asshole.”

“You want my approval?”

“Yes.”

“Since when have you ever cared about my approval, Sene?”

“Since now,” she said.

Rasha reached over the table and took her husband’s hand, very quickly. Her touch seemed to take him by surprise, but only for a moment. He then turned stoic once more. He was a hale and good-looking man with very brown eyes and freckles of some significance. “Of course that is what we want, Isene,” said Rasha. “Of course we will accept him. Revasan, tell her.”

“I will make that decision only after I meet him.”

“Why?” said Sene.

He looked at her, sort of like a hammer falling to the surface of the table. Very hard, very heavy.  “Because that is the way that it is,” he said.

"The way that what is?"

He got up from the table then without another word and he pushed in the chair. He then left the room, and then he left the house. A Lavellan family trait, apparently. Her mother tried to call after him, but the attempt was futile.

Once he was gone, Ellas waved it off, leaning back in his chair. “Another day, another dinner,” he said. “He’s just blowing off steam.”

“Fenedhis, Isene,” said Rasha, her hair sticking up in every direction. It had gotten humid from the rain. Sene knew her hair must have been doing the same exact thing. “Did you have to say that thing about your virginity?”

Sene pushed her plate out of the way and set her forehead down onto the surface of the table. “No.”

Terys lit a joint of elfroot with a piece of flint from his pocket. He took a hit and passed it to Ellas. “It’s good to have you home, Ise,” he said, blowing the smoke out the corner of his mouth. “I can’t wait to meet Solas.”

Rasha shot him a look.

Ellas got up from the table, meanwhile, straightened his shirt around the waist, the joint pressed between his lips. A lithe man, he didn’t have the family height. But his shoulders could fill a doorway. “Rev will be back.”

“No shit,” said Rasha. She got up, took her husband's seat at the head of the table. She put her hand on Sene’s back, sort of checking on her. “Are you okay, Isene?”

“You’re asking if I’m okay?” said Sene.

“Of course I am,” said her mother. "Don't be stupid."

 

_5_

That night, Sene, Morrigan, and Cassandra took a bottle of wine and went out walking on the vineyard paths. The fireflies were going off in blue fashion over the farm fields, and the storm had brought with it some freak heat and humidity that was making them all stick to their clothes. Sene and Cassandra were both drinking their wine from glasses, but Morrigan had declined, choosing to pull hers straight from the bottle instead. She walked out ahead a little bit, looking back as they talked. She seemed very at home here, on the Lavellan compound. Reluctant to leave for any stretch.

“What was that thing you called him again, Morrigan?" she said. "An man of some elegance?"

"Indeed," said Morrigan. "'Tis the truth. Though I should have had the presence of mind to call him arrogant as well."

"What? Why?"

“Because he is arrogant,” said Morrigan. “And aloof. And so is your father. They’ll get along splendidly, I believe. Perhaps they can just stare at each other in a complete stand-off until the world ends.”

"I like your uncle,” said Cassandra. “Ellas. He seems far less…serious than the rest of your family. Is it just because he’s the youngest?”

“He smokes constantly,” said Sene. “That helps. My mom just won't let him during dinner.”

“Was it just me,” said Morrigan, “or did anyone else find it extremely amusing that your mother invoked the _fenedhis_ at the dinner table?”

Sene shoved her in the shoulder. “ _Morrigan._ ”

“Yes?"

“What is _fenedhis_?” said Cassandra, finishing her wine.

“It is elven for _wolf cock,_ ” said Morrigan.

Sene laughed, stumbled into a small tree. “Whoops.”

“Wolf cock?” said Cassandra. “What on earth does wolf cock have to do with any of this?" She then sighed, exasperated. "Andraste save my soul. For I have now said the words _wolf cock_ completely unironically.”

Morrigan smiled, mouth closed, very demure, very knowing, and glanced to Sene, who had taken to leaning.

The smell of this place, it was something else. Like peppery fruit and jasmine, Sene thought. The rains of winter. The fireflies on either side of the path made the world feel small and narrow, but in a good way. Sene smiled at Cassandra. “I’ll explain tomorrow,” she said. “I’m a little too drunk right now to make sense of anything.”

But Cassandra was staring up at the great, fat moon now anyway. She was too distracted and overcome with some happy delirium. “The sky here,” she said. “It is so clear, is it not? I'm sure I need more wine."

"Yes, it is quite clear," said Morrigan, looking up, taking a long pull from the bottle. "'Tis extremely clear. Like there is nothing in its way.”

"Nothing in its way," said Sene. Like what? She wondered about this for a long time.

 

_6_

Missing each other, Sene and Solas met again in the Fade that night. He found her this time in a familiar alcove in the Emprise du Lion. It was cold, the snow very hard, almost like ice. But she was in there, and she had made a fire, kicking around by the glow of an old elven glyph, wearing brown boots and a delicate, blue woolen jacket, freckled in the long bars of cool sunshine. She had her hair in a braid down her back, just like the night before, only this time, when he got there, she asked him to take it down for her, and then they took off all their clothes and sexed on a bearskin mat until they couldn’t take it anymore.

In the Fade, everything was real but not, so making love was filled with sensations that had no logic, and yet, here, seemed both natural and inevitable. He tasted bright and the smells were sticky and wet, and his body was solid and strong, but in the Fade, he was inside every part of her. It seemed to last for hours, and it washed her clean from the day, and yet she knew that this was just an illusion. She didn’t know how much of these perceptions were him and how much were her and how much was just the nature of being in the Fade, but she was used to them now. They didn’t scare her like they had in the beginning.

Now, they lie together in the Fade fur, naked in their Fade bodies. The yellow sailboat of their lives had settled into existence, and its colors had spread into the parts of the sky they could catch through the skylight overhead, filling it with yellow birds. Solas had his arm around her as they looked up at it all, listening to the low hum of the glyph on the wall behind them, and it was a long time before anybody spoke.

"Why are we in the Emprise du Lion?" said Solas eventually.

"I don't know," said Sene. "Maybe it's important."

Solas shrugged. "Or not."

Even in this cold place, she could feel her hair growing with the Fade humidity. It was like Ansburg, and yet it was not. The fire was pretty, but all the warmth in that alcove seemed to be coming from the two of them.

"I don't get how I'm doing this," she said.

"You just are," said Solas. "Don't question it, or it could cease to exist."

"Don't you need magic to walk in the Fade?"

"We're not exactly _walking_ in the Fade," he said. "This is a dream. Though I will admit, it is new."

"Could it be the anchor?"

He let his thumb graze past her lips. "Maybe."

She kissed his hand and put it away. "You made the Veil," she said. "Shouldn't you know what's going on?"

He smiled. "The Veil has evolved, vhenan," he said. "It's not just a spell anymore. The rules are changing."

“I had dinner with my family tonight,” said Sene, tracing shapes in the fur of the bearskin mat. “My dad and Deshanna are back from Wycome.”

“How did it go?” said Solas.

"Dinner or Wycome?"

"Dinner."

Sene sighed, profound and dramatic. “You should have just come with me, Solas,” she said. “I’m sorry I made it into such a big deal.”

“Do not apologize,” he said. “The timing was bad. This was the right decision.”

“Well then I’m sorry for leaving you with all the diplomatic bullshit,” she said.

“I will take that,” he said. “Though I am better at the diplomatic bullshit anyway. Let’s be honest.”

She shoved him, then she sat up and looked around, a bright girl on a summery path, even in the Emprise du Lion. She seemed thoughtful. “Will you have to go anywhere?” she said. “For business stuff?”

“Yes,” said Solas, catching a spider in mid-air. It had dropped from the ceiling. He opened his palm and blew it away. “There is a lead in Kirkwall, related to the assassination attempts at Suledin Keep.”

“Kirkwall?”

“It is shoddy,” said Solas. “But it is something. I will keep you informed.”

“My father asked about you,” said Sene, hunched over a little yellow flower, touching it with her fingers. It was somehow growing straight out of the snow. “A lot. At dinner.”

Solas watched her, focus shifting. He was a little concerned. “What did he ask,” he said.

“He wants to meet you,” she said. “He’s withholding his approval until he does.”

Solas sighed. “I understand that."

“I just think it’s bullshit,” she said. “Like he doesn’t trust me.”

“It is bullshit,” he said. “But it’s just your father. It's not about trust. I am an outsider, and this is his pride, I imagine. When I think about what my father had to go through, dealing with my mother’s family in Arlathan, this seems like nothing at all. It will be okay.”

“You always know what to say,” said Sene.

He smirked into her hair. “Well, I am the Acting Inquisitor.” He put the curls behind her ear, attempted to flatten them to her head. It was useless. “Did you have mercy at least?” he said. “On your father? At dinner?"

“No,” said Sene, covering her face. “I was in no way diplomatic, Solas. I probably made things worse than they had to be.”

“What did you say to him?” he said.

She closed her eyes real tight and held her breath. “Lots of things.”

“Such as.”

“Maybe like, you’re a thirty-something apostate who took my virginity?” She exhaled. It took a minute. When she finally opened her eyes, Solas had his closed. He was perfectly still, pinching the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger as if he had just been struck with a sudden massive headache.

“Are you okay?” she said. “Solas?”

“Yes.”

“I’m so sorry. I just—I was so pissed.”

“It’s all right,” he said. He opened his eyes. “I understand why he needs to meet me before he can trust me, Sene. I would just prefer that he not wish to kill me.”

“He doesn’t want to kill you,” she said. “My mom is very good at damage control.”

“Let us hope so.”

“Did you hear about the land deal in Ferelden?” she said.

“Yes,” said Solas. “I did. That is another matter altogether. That is your Keeper.”

“I’m going to speak with him tomorrow.”

“He wasn’t at your dinner tonight?”

“He didn’t come because he apparently had a headache,” she said.

Solas smiled. “Ah, yes. The headache that is you.”

“I have no idea what to say to him. He is a frustrating man.”

“You'll know what to say,” said Solas. “This is business, but it is not clinical. Hear him out first, Sene, if you can.”

“I’ll try,” she said. “I will. But I need you to...call me something else, Solas. Just for now.”

“Call you something other than Sene?"

“Everyone here calls me Sene.”

“I thought only your father called you Sene.”

“Same difference,” she said.

He sighed. “Isene?”

She shook her head. "That's worse."

Solas gave her a look. “ _Avise’ain_?”

She blushed. “That is better. No one has ever called me that but you.”

“I should hope not.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“Are you all right, _avise’ain_?” he said, studying her hand, seeming to count the freckles, putting them into little constellations in his mind, “after your meeting with the blacksmith’s daughter?”

Sene became wistful. “Yes,” she said. “I’m very flattered by the inheritance.”

“Did you find out what happened?”

“Lung cancer,” she said. “He wasn’t good about healers.”

“I’m sorry, _avise’ain._ ”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I get the feeling like he was dying for years, like he was always just waiting. He missed his wife so much. Does that make sense?”

Solas sighed, tracing his thumb over the delicate veins of her wrist. “Yes.”

“Anyway,” said Sene.

“I told Bull and Dorian,” said Solas, after a little while. “About Fen’Harel.”

She looked at him. “What?”

“And Sera. And Cullen, and Josephine.”

“Solas,” she said. “That’s important.”

“It was necessary,” he said. “If I am going to trust these people, they must be able to trust me. In any case, the more times I tell the story, the less extraordinary it becomes.”

“I'm shocked," she said. "How did they all take it?"

“Like you would expect,” he said. “Bull, Dorian, and Sera best of all. Josephine was in shock, but she is quick to adapt. Cullen, well. He seemed to trust what I told him, but I’m not entirely sure he understands. It may take some time.”

“That’s okay,” she said. “I’m really glad, Solas.”

“I am as well,” he said.

“Is it okay if I tell Cassandra then?” she said. “She should know.”

“Yes, vhenan,” he said. “It is okay.”

Sene got back down onto the mat and pressed her long naked body into his. They were both a little sweaty and itchy from the fur. But they liked these kinds of sensations, as they indicated reality, and reality is what Sene and Solas wanted, in the end. Their bodies were warm. There were butterflies in Sene’s dream now and tall blue flowers that looked like rock candy growing straight up from the snow. “I’m going to just tell you,” she said.

“Tell me what?”

“That my period is late. It’s like six days late.”

He turned toward her. He became very serious. “Sene?” he said.

“I’m not pregnant,” she said. “Maybe I should have started with that.”

He sort of lost his breath a little bit. “Please, start over.”

“I thought I might be pregnant,” said Sene. "After that last night. We were not...safe. And I'm late. So I asked Morrigan to read my energies, and she did, and she said it’s a false alarm.”

His jaw tensed, fluttered. He nodded, once. She could tell he had fully braced himself. “She was sure,” he said.

"I think so," said Sene. "I trust her."

"Are you all right?"

“Yes,” she said. “I just—I wasn’t even going to tell you.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s nothing. It was just a feeling, that’s it.”

“I am sorry about that night,” he said, putting a piece of hair behind her ear. “I was irresponsible. I can hardly even remember what happened. It’s all gotten so twisted in my mind.”

“We were both irresponsible,” she said. “But it’s okay now, Solas. Please don’t worry about it.”

“I won't,” he said, and he sort of smiled, but it was strained.

She picked up his hand after that, grazed his callused palm, wanting very badly to be honest some more. “Solas,” she said.

“Yes?”

“I think it would be a good thing.”

“What would?”

“Having your baby,” she said.

He looked right at her, like he was trying to understand what she had just said to him. It made him seem vulnerable. There were not many instances in which it seemed that Solas did not know everything, in which he became just a man like any other man, but there had been a few, and this was one of them. He was wide open to her, and right up close.

“Not now, of course,” she went on. “But someday. If we want.”

He smiled, measured, but happy. “That is good to know,” he said. 

They kissed in the snowy alcove of the Emprise du Lion. A place of great magic and history between them. He made love to her a second time, this one slower than the last, less urgent, and there were huge bells ringing in the distance as he undid her with his hands and his mouth, then put himself inside and held her to the earth. Control had no meaning here, for either of them. She whispered his name into his ear as he came, as she knew this would draw out his release, and he breathed heavily, his face in her hair, and then finally he was finished. He rolled off of her and onto his back, glistening in the light from the elven glyph, spent, smiling brightly into the Fade wind, and she clung to his arm.

“ _Isalan na sasha,_ ” he said to her, holding her curly head in his hand. _I want only you._

And when they were done basking in the sun and the aftermath, they got up and got dressed together, and they said goodbye, and they both woke up in their separate beds, and they both stared up at their separate ceilings, prepared to face their separate days, full of separate tasks and negotiations, feeling satisfied and a little wistful but still separate, and like some unknown variable had been solved between them. They could go on now, in their own bodies. Just two tall elves, very nearly squared away into existence, their paths finally beginning to converge, piece by piece.


	46. Two Elves Walk Into a Bar, Pt. 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kirkwall and the Hinterlands. Happy people and sad. New friends and old. Lovers and enemies. So many shining possibilities at the late night establishment. Part one of two.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _cw: violence, blood_

After Crestwood, Abelas had wandered south until he reached the Hinterlands, over a period of two weeks, making his way through the unlucky back country of Ferelden. Tavern to tavern. He would grow, treat, and trade his own elfroot for conversation. It was the only way he knew how to do things, and he was very fucked-up and sort of like a backwards wind-up doll. Out here all alone and flung to the wind. He was supposed to be twenty-five years old, but his heart felt both much younger and much older at the same time. It seemed not right. He was so used to instruction, and patience, and cold, but this world was complex and full of heat and buzzing bodies and things that he sort of liked but simply did not know what to do with. So he tried to remember what Solas had told him back in Crestwood about gifts.

 _Gifts._ Everybody likes gifts, Solas had said. And trades. And that is when Abelas started noticing beautiful waitresses and how humans and elves alike were kind and full of use, but he did not want to use them. He found that once he got over his initial anger and shock of entry, he only wanted to talk. But it was complicated. Nobody knew who he was here, or cared about the things he had lost, and they all had their own problems of the modern world, and for this, he did not blame them, so they would lend him their time, which was a kind gesture, but they would not lend him their hearts. He was alone.

Then, a couple of days after he got to the Hinterlands, Abelas met a Dalish girl inside the city of Redcliffe. She was mild with her black hair twisted into a knot on top of her head, her mouth like a winter berry. Her clan was unusual and lived outside the walls on a small dairy farm. The two of them sat together at the bar, and she talked of cows as if they were her best friends, and he found this to be fascinating. Her name was _El’u’leal,_ which meant something like _window_ , and that’s what he’d wanted to call her, _Window,_ but for some reason, this made her blush so he apologized. She said, “Call me El.” He liked this, too. He liked anything she told him to do.

The night they met, they went out to the porch of the Gull and Lantern. Somebody had put tables there, and there were lots of of elves and humans standing side-by-side, and all of them smokers. The Inquisition, he noticed, seemed to have brought a lot of peace to this place. He liked the idea, and he liked the Inquisitor, too, as for a long time, he’d put a lot of stock in that night they’d spent together, smoking out on that ledge, built it up in his mind like some sort of myth— _Isene Lavellan._ Pretty girl like fire, and he had taken to calling her _Ise_ in his mind, where she sort of lived now, wearing nothing, the red hair big and unkempt like she had crawled straight from nature with her hand out.

But that day with El the Dalish girl, Abelas didn’t think about Isene Lavellan. He didn’t think about the past at all. He had his little teak box painted pretty with the dragons of old, and he showed it to her, how to do it, perfectly—roll the joint. He was the son of elfroot farmers however many lifetimes before, and this kind of thing stays true forever. She watched with her chin in her hands. Of course, she had seen it all before, but she liked this big elven man named Abelas, showing her things. He had said that he was Dalish, but she got the idea that he was something else that she couldn’t explain. There was a big magic about him. The way he sealed the joint and lit it with a handful of fire. The way he smoked and let his eyes close in ancient reverie. The way he was tall, making the world feel calm like he, himself, was a drug, or a mage of some serious power. And yet he knew so much about farming. Imagine that.

Whatever it was, she found him interesting. In the very least, he was full of boyish wisdoms and a bashful charm, and he treated her with an utmost respect. She could have pet his head all day. She could have brushed his hair. She was twenty-one and bored and full of indifference in the Hinterlands.

And he was there.

She brought him back to her farm and introduced him to her parents and her brothers and her clan’s Keeper, and they were all amenable to him. They were an amenable clan, and they liked him right away. He was upright and uncomplicated, and he took direction well, a little like a child lost but filled with ingenuity and perseverance and strange magics that made the day pass easy, and they took him in, and they put him to work, farming the fields, which was a job he understood better than anything, and this was good for Abelas. To have a job. Keeper Vunleas blessed his feelings for El on a Wednesday. He and El became fast lovers, their bodies joined in the deep-throated, wet winter nights of Ferelden.

Sort of like Solas, Abelas liked to feel useful, but Abelas did not want for much. He had known the bodies of many women as Commander of Mythal’s Sentinels, but he had never known the love of a woman, and so, unlike Solas, he was not always trying to take it back from the world. Abelas felt he had very little to earn and even less to prove. He just needed to get by, and he slid quickly into the throes of adaptation, like they were made for him. El was like a lantern, and she floated out front. Easy to follow. He let her lead him, and she liked him to hold her, to feel small in his embrace, and she let him right into her heart, and he went there, folding her little paper hornets and bumblebees that flew, making love to her by the river’s edge. They lived simple, unimportant lives in which nobody knew their names. Their identities existed only in service of one another and El’s clan in the Hinterlands. She asked very few hard questions, did not care who he was, where he came from. He was content to forget it all. Still he knew that one day, he would have to relive it, hoped that she would understand, because the dreams were like acid inside. She was a very good listener and a wonderful archer, but she didn’t like to hunt. She liked the sport of it. She liked to be on the farm and take communion with the animals. She would laugh and scrunch up her little nose, and he would kiss it, because it felt good.

He still kept the note that the Inquisitor had left for him on the ledge in Crestwood so many months before. _You know how to find me,_ it said. Once El had found it, folded into the shape of a bird on his bedside table, and she asked him, innocently, what it was. It was the only time he could ever remember being terse with her, and she left the room with her feelings hurt. This went on for a day. He felt terrible, but he did not know how to explain himself. He didn’t know how to explain the fact that he somehow missed a woman he hardly knew. That he dreamed of her sometimes, and she made the bad dreams go away, made the feelings real, she and that one night they’d spent together. So he told El he was sorry by the light of the moon, and then they were back to normal, as if life was short and none of it mattered anyway.

He thought he must have loved her after this, but he could not find the words or understanding to let her know. She was young enough to tell him anyway. _You are a good man, Abelas,_ she said to him later that week, as they lie together on the banks of the river, and she traced the strange shapes of the vallaslin on his chest with her bare fingers. _You are good to me, and I love you, and you don’t have to say it. I love you anyway. It only makes me love you more._ He felt it deep inside, her outpouring, and though he could not quite go to it himself, he believed her.

That night, he fell asleep and dreamed of walking away from her. Leaving her on a ledge somewhere, hanging way out over the sea. He could hear everything, the noises all very loud in his head, and in the morning, when he woke up, he felt alone and sick to his stomach, but she was still there, and it was the new world, and she still loved him. It was extraordinary, but he was so terribly confused, he did not know what to do, so he took it as a sign, and he finally just said it. He told her he loved her, that very morning, even though he was not entirely sure. He was pretty sure, and that was good enough, and she was practical and full of forgiveness, and he knew that even if he did not fully love her now, he would love her soon. Very soon. She burrowed up next to him and asked him to take off her nightgown. He was happy to do this, and as he did, he could feel the uncertainty just drifting away, far away. Even if only for a moment or two.

Abelas did not understand the hearts and minds of women. The bouyancy and the sudden wilt. He figured Isene Lavellan was halfway to the altar with the Wolf by now, and this would be the end of it. So he would lie in the sun by the side of the river with El, and he would farm the fields with the men he knew, and at night, he would spend time with her brothers by the fire, and together, they would smoke his pretty plants. He had told El he loved her, and now, all his problems were going to be solved. He would live out this new life in the Hinterlands, which reminded him so much of home.

But it was in his dreams that he did not like to be reminded of home. So he would no longer think of home, and he would forget about Mythal. He would forget about the day her life left her body, and Solas’s revenge and the terrible sounds of grief he made by the foot of the mirror when he learned the truth. And he would forget about Ise, the redhaired Inquisitor who’d once lent him her heart on a ledge somewhere to the north. For he had found a way to convince himself that he would never see her again, or Solas, and the world was no longer theirs anyway, and this was good enough. All of it was good enough. But he still, sometimes, in the moments when he least expected it, the moments when he was otherwise at peace, found himself wondering when it was going to get better.

 

Solas was docked in Kirkwall inside of two weeks. He entered the city with Dorian, Bull, and Thom Rainier, flanked by thirty or so Inquisition guards, plus a healthy crop of agents arranged secretly, and in advance, in various locations all throughout the city. Varric had gone in a few days before to prepare for the Inquisition’s arrival. He’d sent a scout with word that Fenris would be outside the city walls for at least another two nights— _camping,_ that was the term he had used—and though this seemed suspicious Solas had very little choice but to shack up in Hawke’s estate in the city and give it due time. Hawke, himself, had plans to be back the next morning to confer with Solas on several business matters pertaining the elven alienage of Lowtown. Hawke had been there in the Fade however many months in the past, and this kind of thing sticks men together and bonds them for an eternity. For the most part, according to Varric, he just wanted to catch up. Though he was disappointed that Sene would not be there. She was more popular than she would have guessed inside the city walls, as Hawke had planted a great many stories of her valor. _The Tall Red Elf_ was how she’d come to be known, and he promised a parade in her honor, should she ever choose to visit, even if not for another twenty years.

The city of Kirkwall felt old, and battered to Solas. The squalor got to him. But the market districts were active and Hightown was in marvelous shape. He, Thom, Dorian, and Bull were bored and itchy from the journey, and so the moment they arrived at Hawke’s estate, they decided they wanted to drink. So they changed their clothes and met Varric at the Hanged Man of Lowtown. It was sort of hopping and there were women everywhere, hanging off the piano and the bar stools like foliage. One of them asked Dorian to take off her top, and he laughed and told her to ask Solas, which she did, and Solas just sighed, and bought her a glass of pink wine instead, and she was grateful for this. The five men pushed into the back and took over a corner table, the guards in close quarters but out of earshot. Their entrance had initially caused a bit of a sensation but that all wore off after a while. The Inquisition was a thing, but not everybody knew their faces here. Solas, himself, was incredibly recognizable but unless you read the post from front to back you might have missed him. Or mistook him for a bouncer the way he hulked. The tallest elf in the room by a foot.

Solas went to the bar, wearing a jacket with a light fur trim. Thom went with him. They sat down and Solas leaned on his elbows, surveying the hundred or so bottles of booze on mirrored shelves on the wall. When the bartender came over, Solas smiled and ordered two glasses of scotch poured neat for him and Thom right there, and then they toasted and sipped in relative silence. The piano played and two young bards sang in brass harmonies. It was a good night. The Inquisition’s presence was a good omen, in general. The candles on the walls danced as if enchanted and Solas could feel it—they would burn all night long. He did not particularly like Kirkwall. But he very much liked this bar, as it reminded him a little of the casinos of Arlathan. He hadn’t been down in the guts of a big city like this in a very long time.

“Not bad,” said Thom, setting down the glass. “Though I don’t think I’ve ever seen you order a glass of scotch before, Solas. Is this some sort of ancient elf thing I’m just now learning about?”

Solas smiled, studied the color of the liquor in the glass. “Not at all,” he said. “Tonight, I just felt like scotch.”

“Any scotch, or this scotch in particular?”

“This is an old old bottle,” said Solas, “very expensive. From the Lavellan Dalish Distillery in Ansburg.”

“Ah,” said Thom. “Very good.”

“You can’t really find it outside the Free Marches,” said Solas. “Not yet, at least. I wanted to try it for myself. It does the trick.”

“You’ve been away from Sene for what, five weeks?” said Thom.

“Just about,” said Solas.

“How’s it been? Five weeks is a long time.”

Solas swallowed. The scotch burned in a dry, smooth sort of way, and yes, he missed her. It was her voice and her body that did it, and it was less of a thought or a feeling and more just like a state of being. Constant. He had always been pretty good at compartmentalizing those baser parts of the brain, but lately, his every perception seemed to live in the motion of their fucking and in the the pink corners of her mouth. It was always there. Like an inlay, pretty and red and wet. “It is a long time,” he said.

“You keep busy, I suppose,” said Thom.

“I see her in the Fade on occasion,” said Solas. “It is not the same, of course. She’s different there. It’s too much like a dream.”

“I’m sure you’ll get a chunk of change from the Inquisition per your services," said Thom, "not to mention the Kingdoms of Ferelden and Orlais. Think the two of you will buy a castle somewhere? Hole away forever and live your lives in extravagant privacy?”

Solas smiled and shook his head. “Privacy would be good,” he said. “But I drank, slept, and got the shit kicked out of me in extravagant castles every day of my life for the entirety of my twenties. I have no intention of doing it again."

“Can’t say I envy you and all the shit you must have endured,” said Thom, “but somehow, I can’t imagine it was all bad.”

Solas drank. This was the first time he’d really ever talked about this with anyone but Sene, as if it had really happened. He no longer felt himself reliving it, and this was such a crushing relief, like putting his head through a wooden plank and coming alive. “It was not all bad,” he said. "The drugs, for instance. And the whiskey. They were top of the line."

“Sene knows all of this?”

“She knows all of it,” said Solas, swirling around the last bit of scotch in his glass, then finishing it in one clean swallow. “There are still a few things that she’s coming to terms with, things I know she still doesn’t understand, but it is only a matter of time. I believe that she has forgiven me.”

“A lucky man,” said Thom.

Solas called on the bartender for a refill.

“Does she know you’re in Kirkwall then?” said Thom.

“She does,” said Solas.

“Ansburg is what, a three day’s ride from here?”

“I have not done the math.”

“This business with Fenris—that’s his name right? Fenris?” Thom set down his glass.

“That is his name.”

“Right. This business with Fenris shouldn’t take long, if he even shows his face at all. Has it crossed your mind to head for the hills, surprise her after we're done here? You could meet her family, the whole caboodle.”

Solas half-grinned down at the bar. It was shined up good, but old. The grain was rough. “I believe she's halfway to the Hinterlands by now,” he said, “on her way to meet Sera and Dagna.”

“I thought it was Crestwood.”

“Apparently, Dagna was held up. A ruin or something.”

“She’d go back for you, you know,” said Thom. “To Ansburg. She’d probably come all the way to meet you here, if you asked.”

“Of course she would,” said Solas. The bartender was there now, refilling his glass. “But this is business, Thom, and she’s had her fill of business, and these plans for a while. The next time I see her, we will be home, and I am very much looking forward to that.”

“Fair enough,” said Thom.

“I thought so,” said Solas.

They drank. At the bar, somebody was smoking. The seat beside Solas cleared, and another man came and sat down. He wore a hood and ordered a glass of beer, and Solas simply glanced and went on as if nothing had changed.

“What about you?” said Solas. He leaned forward with his elbows on the surface of the bar, like he meant business.

“What about me?”

“How are you doing? Away from Skyhold.”

“I won’t lie,” said Thom. “It’s good to get out of there, but I’ve been itching to hit something since we left the mountains.”

“I understand that,” said Solas. He shifted, squared up his shoulders, took a long drink. “Probably better than your realize.”

“Wonder if there’s a crop of bandits out in the Vinmarks or something.” He cracked his knuckles. “Been a long time since I undertook a bit of honest mercenary work. Of course, for the Inquisition, it would be more like charity, but it’s all the same sport in the moment, isn't it?”

“There is no killing bandits for the sport of it,” said Solas. “You’re always saving someone.”

“You and your poetry.” Thom laughed.        

The man beside Solas had pushed back his hood now, only just. The points of his ears were high as he watched the two of them, clandestine, from the corner of his eye. It was a suspicious cover-up. His face was tattooed and very possibly Dalish, but he had tried to cover it up with soot, and there were burn scars. He had very black hair.

Thom seemed to notice him looking at first, though Solas was unconcerned. “Who the fuck is this guy?” said Thom.

“He is a Qunari assassin,” said Solas.

Thom set down his glass. The room felt strange all of a sudden, like it was filling with smoke from the ground up. He gave Solas a very serious look, though wary, as if he did not believe him at first. “Are you off your nut, elf?”

“Not in the slightest,” said Solas. "I'm reading him like a book." One at a time then, he rolled up his sleeves. "Watch."

Solas smirked. Thom waited, in earnest. Solas then turned his head and smirked at the man to his left. When that man did not smirk back, Solas nodded in self-satisfaction, and then with incredible speed, he took that man by the back of the head and slammed him face-first into the bar.

The sound was loud. Somewhere, a woman gasped in confusion, and the whole place got sort of quiet. The bartender was a young human with very big green eyes, and he backed into the mirrored shelves with his hands up so hard, a couple of bottles fell to the floor and shattered into a million pieces. The smell of alcohol made the air feel hot. Meanwhile, the assassin’s face had sort of exploded there against the bar, and there was blood getting into the wood grain. He was drifting back and forth, hovering with his head hanging between his shoulders, trying to gather his bearings. Solas was doing something to him, putting his perceptions into a dream world, and as he did this, he reached into the assassin’s jacket and removed a heavy dagger with a shined up hilt. He tossed it to the bar.

Thom swore when he saw this. They were both on their feet now. Solas took back the man’s hood, picked him up by the hair, and yanked him out into the open. The man held his face and straightened up as best he could after that, but he was not as tall as Solas, and the black hair was matted in his eyes with the blood from his nose.

“To your love, Inquisitor,” he said anyway, a familiar incantation, and he lunged for the weapon on the bar like a fool.

It was an easy miss though. Solas took the man by the hair one more time and did the same thing as before. His face went to pulp against the surface of the bar, and he staggered, and Solas, in fine form, ribs healed, sort of riled now, swigged the rest of his scotch and stepped around the bar stool. He wiped the sweat from his chin on the back of his hand, reached into his pocket, and found one of Sene’s hairpins, which he set neatly between his teeth. The dagger still sat on the bar to his right, untouched.

“Solas,” said Thom.

But he was fixated. On the assassin. “You,” he said.

"Fuck off, mage," said the assassin.

“The last time your people struck," said Solas, "I was lying flat on my back, unconscious from a blow dealt to me by a High Dragon in the Emprise du Lion. I wonder if you knew that?"

The assassin said nothing.

“It was a terrible inconvenience,” Solas continued. “I hated to miss it, especially the part where your friends followed the Inquisitor into the crowded courtyard of Suledin Keep and made not one but two rather brutish attempts on her life.” Solas leaned in, asserted his height, fussing with the ends of his sleeves. His voice got deep, falling apart into gravelly pieces. “Know that I do not mind you attacking _me_ here, in the Hanged Man tavern of Lowtown in Kirkwall, elf. Please do not get me wrong about that. This is, in fact, what I would prefer. But you tried to chop her head off with an axe."

“That wasn’t me,” said the assassin.

“It might as well have been,” said Solas. “You're all sourced from the same well. And I will find it, in due time. But for now, I feel compelled to make you a deal. I’ll give you your weapon. You lay one single blow, and I let you kill me where I stand. I wager your death is imminent, and ripe with brutality, but you’re free to play the odds.”

The assassin wanted blood.

But now, Thom. He had not budged, and he placed a hand on Solas's shoulder, very firm and serious, dragging him backward.

“Not the time,” said Solas.

"It is the time,” said Thom. “Leliana will take care of the interrogation back at Skyhold. That is her job.”

“Perhaps you did not hear me,” said Solas.

Thom bristled, then jacked Solas backward hard and put his mouth to his ear. “You feel like gambling?” he said. “Let’s play cards. You’re making this personal, Solas. I let you kill him, in front of all these people, for no reason other than to have your show, the Inquisition has to answer for that. There’s too much to lose, my friend, and there is no justification. We didn’t come here for blood.”

Solas slouched him off, unstuck and greedy. He then glanced at the floor with his jaw set, considered, dipped back on his heels, swung and dropped the assassin to the floor with a single punch. It was unexpected. The elf went with a thud, but he was conscious, just rolling around sick as Solas clenched his hands into fists and felt the blood beating like bolts in his brain. He waited then as four Inquisition guards scraped the assassin off the floor and stuck him in chains and then hauled his ass out the back entrance. One of the guards approached, albeit carefully, and she explained that the assassin would be sent to the jail in the Viscount’s Keep until Josie could arrange for his extradition back to Skyhold. Solas nodded, said literally nothing, and sent the guard away, and then he fit his knuckles into the palm of his hand and closed his eyes, counting.

Thom, meanwhile, just sighed. He finished off his scotch and motioned for Solas to follow him out the front door. It took him a moment, but Solas did go, without question, chin to his chest, hands in his pockets, aware but still raw, and then they were in the alley out front standing in the hollow light of a street lamp. Thom stood back and told him, very wise, that he had done the right thing. "Cool off," he said. "Come back when you're ready."

"Thank you," said Solas, but it was terse, then Thom went inside without another word and left Solas alone.

Solas could hear, back in the bar, the piano had started back up again. The night went on as usual as he turned around and leaned and pressed his palms to the wall as hard as he could for what felt like a very long time. When he finally got it together, and he shook out his head like a fucking animal, he wandered a little and then bummed a joint of elfroot off a young elven man who was dressed like a blacksmith’s apprentice. It happened fast. As they smoked, the boy looked up at Solas as if he were the great, fearsome superhero of his life. Solas, meanwhile, could feel his head, splitting. His knuckles, aching. All this inaction was making him reckless again. At some point as he stood their smoking in the alley in front of the Hanged Man, he thought back to that afternoon in the Exalted Planes when he had asserted his revenge on a gaggle of mages who had, in a similar fashion, personally incurred his wrath. He’d wanted to kill them with his bare hands, but that wouldn’t have been fast enough, and so he'd had to use fire instead, and once the job was finished, he left Sene and Dorian and Bull where they stood in the northern beauty of the Exalted Planes, and for a long time, thought he was never going back to them.

What had changed between then and now? Solas wasn't running. He felt that he had, at some point, effectively unpacked his heart into thousands of separate little compartments on her doorstep, and she, singlehandedly, put them back together again. Or perhaps she had only supervised. It didn’t really matter. She was there. In the Exalted Planes, Sene could not have stopped him if she tried. _There’s too much to lose, friend._ Thom may have been referring to the Inquisition or he may have been referring to Sene, but sort of like the thing with his heart parts, the difference didn’t really matter. Not anymore.

Once, when Solas was twenty-two years old, he had gone to a party with Mythal at June’s strange and beautiful palace built of glittery knives and rope. After dinner, a lieutenant of Andruil’s had lunged at Mythal in the parlor in a drunken fit, and Solas, in the space of a single second, removed the man’s spine in punishment. It had once been Solas’s job to make examples of those who did not know their place. It had used to be complicated, but now, whenever he was with Mythal or thought about Mythal, he no longer wanted to die or to rip out the spines of his enemies. He just felt this old stress, deep, like a headache that reached from the back of his neck all the way to the top of his head. He still loved her, as he always would in his way, because things had gone past romance for them a long time before. But a large part of why he wanted to spend his life with Sene was because, with Sene, the job was much simpler. It was much more natural. It was just to _be_. Protecting Sene was a consequence of his love and not the other way around. Mythal understood this sort of thing, he knew. She always had. She had understood this for thousands of years, and it was, perhaps, the one thing that, during their Great War, she understood better than anyone. It was the reason she lasted as long as she did.

For Solas, however, this was a revelation, and he knew exactly what he needed to do. It was just a matter of figuring out when and how.

He ashed the joint. The elfroot was weak, but it would do. A few Inquisition guards had since emerged from the shadows, just keeping an eye, and this was fine. Solas smoked and he released in big gulps to the city air. You could hear the sounds from the bar, muffled behind them. Everything loud and bright and big.

“What is your name?” Solas said eventually to the boy. He’d grown bored of thinking. He wanted to talk.

The boy looked up, shocked. “I’m Daniel,” he said.

“Daniel.” Solas held out his hand. “I am Solas.”

The boy shook it, eagerly. He must have been seventeen years old. “I know who you are,” he said. “I read the post.”

Solas smiled. He ashed the joint and blew the smoke from the corner of his mouth. He looked around. The streets of Lowtown were stone and everything felt narrow and cramped in for good. Down on the corner, there was a prostitute hooking an out-of-place businessman with a funny eye piece. The scenario was so safely typical, a happy constant.

“Do you live in the alienage?” Solas said after a moment, tossing the joint to the stone.

“Yeah,” said Daniel, offering him another. “It’s no big deal.”

Solas took the joint and lit it with a palm full of fire. This dazzled the boy who just stared for a moment, his eyes big as a house. “I’m going to be this side of the Waking Sea for another week, at least,” said Solas, on an exhale. “A diplomatic thing. Would you be willing to take me through your alienage, show me around?”

“Of course,” said Daniel. “Of course I would be willing to do that.”

“Perfect,” said Solas, smiling. “How can I find you?”

“Just come to the Maywether Blacksmith any time during the day,” he said. “It’s right around the corner, here in Lowtown. I’m the apprentice.”

“How old are you?” said Solas.

“Seventeen,” said Daniel.

“That’s a bit young to be a blacksmith’s apprentice.”

“I’m told I have a gift,” he said, looking at his hands. “Mr. Maywether is the only blacksmith in Kirkwall who would take an elf as his apprentice. If I study up properly, I could leave this place.”

“Where would you like to go instead?” said Solas.

“Honestly?” said Daniel, scuffing a boot across the stone. “Ferelden. If I can. Highever, just across the sea. Elves are treated better there.”

“What do you mean?” said Solas.

“Because of the Inquisition,” said Daniel. “The Inquisitor. And you. Excuse my language, Ser Solas, but people don’t fuck with elves in Ferelden and Orlais. They’re too afraid of you there. Here, it’s not entirely the same, not yet.”

Solas smiled at this. “Not yet,” he said.

There was an understanding, between them. They glanced at one another.

“I have another question for you, Daniel,” said Solas. “Unrelated.”

“Ask me anything,” said Daniel. “Really, anything.”

“Have you ever ridden your horse from here to Ansburg?” said Solas, joint hitched to the corner of his mouth, hands in his pockets.

“All the time,” said Daniel. “Or like, at least once every other month. The prices there are better, on certain rare metals.”

“How long does it take?” said Solas, concentrating on the smoke. It was like his head lifting off his body. He was a grown man and he was done with the bullshit.

“Will you be alone?” said Daniel. “With civilians?”

“A small cavalry,” said Solas. “Most likely. Experienced riders. No civilians.”

“Five days?” said Daniel. He smoked, real practiced. His hair was brown and rumpled, and he had round, young cheeks. “Three if you only take half nights, or you skip one altogether, and your horses are fit. Just head east up the coast, and once you get to Ostwick, cut north and ride till you hit the Minanter. It’s easier than the mountain pass. Too many bandits.”

“Good to know,” said Solas. “That is helpful. Thank you.”

“No problem,” said Daniel.

Solas glanced back to the corner. The woman and the businessman had gone. There was nobody now. Just a streetlamp. He continued to smoke outside the Hanged Man with Daniel.

“Ser Solas,” said the boy after a while.

“It’s just Solas.”

“Right. Solas,” he said. “Can I ask you a question now?”

“Of course.”

“What’s in Ansburg.”

Solas studied the joint between his fingers. Then, he studied the boy. “Well," said Solas. "The Inquisitor is in Ansburg. Or, something to that effect."

“Inquisitor Lavellan.”

“You may call her Sene.”

The joint, it burned real slow. The way it burned like that, and this young kid in front of him right now in his merchant's clothing, it made Solas think of Abelas. His perfect plants, the artistry and the innocence. Solas hardly remembered their last conversation. Too much time and grief had come between them, and neither one of them had spoken from the heart. This nudged him. Made him worry, made him guilty.

“Sene Lavellan,” continued Daniel, nodding his head. “Right. You do know, Solas, what people call the Lavellans around here, don’t you?”

This broke the spell. Solas looked up, totally confused. “No. What?”

“The _booze elves_ of Ansburg,” said Daniel, smiling, dusting the ash from his slacks. “They’re kind of intimidating, if you ask me. I mean no disrespect, of course. But their compound is like 400 acres big. Their Keeper, he’s some kind of magician diplomat. He manipulated the Chantry into posting Templars at the perimeter. They keep no mages. It's fucking intense.”

Solas just stared at him. “ _Booze elves_?” he said.

“Yeah. Because, you know. The booze.”

“I have to make them like me,” said Solas out of nowhere, tossing the dead joint to the street. “I am very good at making people like me, but this is important. How do I do that?”

Daniel shrugged. Despite everything he’d just said, he seemed unconcerned. “Sene’s a girl, right?”

Solas gave him a look. “As far as I know, yes, she is a girl.”

“I mean—you know what I mean. My experience with girls like that—it doesn't matter who they are, their fathers are always protecting them. It’s a bunch of bullshit.”

Solas dug his palms into his eyeballs. “Yes, I understand that.”

“So haven’t you ever like, rescued her? Saved her life? Fixed something for her? Whatever? Even if it seems stupid to you, you got to be chivalrous with these people. They don’t like weakness.” He took a long hit.

“How do you know this?” said Solas.

“Once I liked a human girl from Hightown,” said Daniel. “Her father told me to fuck off, obviously, but then I fixed the axle on his carriage. He was so impressed that he invited me to dinner at their house. Her mother thought I was cute or something. She liked my ears? I literally have no idea. Anyway, I guess I had something to offer them. So they let me go on dates with their daughter. Of course, I already had been going on dates with their daughter. Now they were just...allowed.”

“You fixed the axle on this man’s carriage?” said Solas. “That is all that it took?”

“The men of Hightown can’t do anything for themselves,” he said. “Soft hands. I think I opened his eyes a little bit. Anyway, it didn’t work out with the girl. But I still felt pretty good about myself.”

“As you should,” said Solas. He sighed. He looked up at the moon. It was sort of pink tonight, like there was pollution somewhere. “I have been here before.”

“Lowtown?” said Daniel.

“No,” said Solas. “I cannot explain. It just seems too perfect, somehow.”

“I don’t really know what you’re talking about,” said Daniel. “But perfect is supposed to be a good thing. Right?”

Solas put his hands in his pockets, looked down at the cracks in the sidewalk where the weeds poked through. Then, he looked at Daniel. "Yes," he said. "It is a good thing. Somehow."

"That's what I thought." Daniel was fishing through his pockets for more drugs now. Once he found the elfroot, he sat down on the ground and rolled it up and gave another one of the joints to Solas, and they stood there, together, smoking some more as the wind picked up. It all burned off real slow. Solas's head.

He felt purified.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's note: Yes, I am completely aware that scotch can't really exist where there is no Scotland, but I did it anyway. In my brain, it had to be scotch. <3 -g
> 
> Also, have a song for Abelas: "I Wish I Was the Moon" by Neko Case ([YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYT3KgKcQHs), [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/track/4PxzGOH79jcmmldKgoI9sB))


	47. Two Elves Walk Into a Bar, Pt. 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two elves walk into a bar. Things take a turn. Sene runs into an old friend in the Hinterlands. Part two of two.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _cw: violence, alcohol abuse, emotional trauma_

_1\. Whiskey Me Good  
_

“He’s big,” said Hawke, taking a gulp of whiskey. Solas and Thom had just exited the bar. There were several Inquisition guards now, cleaning up Solas’s mess, but the girls were back singing at the piano, and all the fun was back and golden like a jukebox on repeat. “For an elf, I mean.”

Fenris rolled his eyes and drank.

“Yes, I don’t believe he’s heard that one before,” said Dorian, filing a hangnail from his pinky finger. “Great big massive elf. You should definitely tell him the moment he gets back.”

“Seriously?” said Hawke.

Varric laughed into his booze.

“This is fucking bullshit,” said Bull, slamming his fist into the table. It was loud and disconcerting to a group of women nearby. They ruffled like little birds. This seemed to soften him, immediately. He lowered his voice. “I know it’s the fucking Ben-Hassrath,” he said.

“And yet you’re Tal Vashoth,” said Varric, pouring himself another drink. “So there’s nothing you can do. Let’s just wait for Chuckles, and then we can sort through all this shit like professionals.”

Bull grunted and finished his beer. They all sat and looked at their hands. Varric was shuffling a deck of cards. Hawke tipped his mouth to Fenris’s ear, but Fenris kind of swatted him off. “Now?” he said.

At some point, Thom Rainier came back inside and stood staring at Fenris as if he’d seen a ghost. “You’re here?” he said. “Andraste’s tits. Are you the informant?”

“Yes.”

Hawke puffed up. Like feathers. “Fenris and I knew the assassin would be here the whole time,” he said. “We were trying to misdirect him and failed.” He finished his drink, closed his eyes. “Miserably.”

“Maker’s balls,” said Thom, having a seat next to Dorian. “You might’ve warned us. Do you know what it’s like having to talk Solas back from that sort of altercation? I thought I might lose my fucking throat just for stating the obvious.”

“Yes, well,” said Hawke. “I apologize.”

Blackwall put his face in his hands.

“Is he good?” said Bull. “Solas—everything okay there?”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Thom, pouring himself a tall glass of something brown. “He just needs a minute.”

“How did you know?” said Dorian to Fenris. “About the assassin. If you don’t mind my asking.”

“I don’t mind,” said Fenris, tipping a bit of clear liquor from the bottle to his empty class. “But I’ll wait for your boss—the acting Inquisitor and mage who gets his hands dirty.”

“Heard of him, have you?” said Thom.

“Some,” said Fenris. “Mostly from Hawke. He loves reading the gossip columns in the post.”

“They talk of Sene, mostly,” said Hawke. He was picking at a white linen bandage on his hand now, his brown hair sort of rumpled, liked he’d just woken from sleep. “Fascinating woman. Foul mouth, but pretty. I saw her throat-stab a demon in the Fade with one of her arrows and then tell it to fuck off.” He laughed to himself. “Memories.”

“Oh yeah, that was a fucking blast,” said Bull.

“You know Sene is one of  _those_ Lavellans, right, Fenris?” said Varric. He held up his glass.

“Ah, the booze elves,” said Fenris, examining the bottle on the table. On its label read _Lavellan Family Farm and Distillery_. “Can’t say I’m surprised. Nor do I envy the apostate mage trying to marry into that.”

“What of it?” said Thom.

“The Lavellans are like Dalish royalty,” said Varric. “They run booze and have for a lot of years, which means they've got a hand in pretty much every corner of trade up here in the Free Marches. When it comes to their heirs, they like purity, and they don’t like magic.”

“Purity along what line?” said Thom.

“The Dalish line,” said Varric. He sighed. “Anyway, is Solas covered out there? Does he have guards and…guards? This place is about as safe as we’re making it right now.”

“There are guards,” said Thom, drinking. “And guards. Not like he needs them, but still.”

“Perhaps we should leave,” said Hawke. “Go back to my estate.”

“Fuck that,” said Bull. “We leave when we feel like it. These assassins are like children. They use petty weapons and have shit for training. My guess is they’ll come in numbers. Weak, but constant. Like those little, stupid dogs that nip at your heels. It’s a smoke screen for something bigger. It’s gotta be. An invitation.”

“Invitation to where?” said Dorian. “ _Qunari Assassins, Incorporated_?”

“No, kadan,” said Bull. “The Darvaraad.”

“The Darvar…come again?”

"What the bloody hell is that?” said Thom.

“Ben-Hassrath stronghold,” said Bull. He was upset. He was crushing his cup. It was made of tin or aluminum or something like that. “A place for guarding and studying magic. Ah, fuck me. Fuck me.”

“Calm down,” said Dorian. “Please, Bull. This is not your fault.”

“I could have prevented it,” he said. “Instead, I was a fucking wise ass about the whole thing. A fucking piece of crap.”

“You saved your men,” said Dorian, “and even if you are a wise ass, had you not become Tal Vashoth, then you’d be loyal to _them_ , and where would that leave Sene and the Inquisition? Worse yet, where would that leave me?”

Bull gave him a long, mean look, then grunted in appreciation. He wrenched Dorian in and kissed him once, fast on the face. “You speaking sense isn’t helping,” he said.

“Sure it is,” said Dorian. “It’s just taking a while to sink in. You’ll appreciate the gesture soon enough, I assure you.”

           

Some time later, Solas finally came back inside. He was half-stoned but somehow clear as morning. He did not seem at all surprised to see Hawke or Fenris. They had saved a space for him at the head of the table. He was wearing heavy leather gloves and took them off, one by one, and then he sat and poured himself a glass from Fenris’s bottle, and he took a clean drink, waited, and breathed, then he drank again. It had been a long fucking night, and he was ready to go home.

“So,” he said after a little while, looking up at Fenris. “You’re Fenris.”

“Indeed.”

“I believe you’re being followed.”

Fenris raised his eyebrows. “Very good,” he said.

Solas nodded, a little weary, refilled his glass. “Hawke, it is good to see you.”

“And you,” said Hawke.

“I caught you on the way out—saw you,” said Solas. “I figured your cancelled _plans_ were a way of trying to throw assassins off my trail. Can’t say I’m not grateful for the effort. However, we are now faced with the real problem.”

“Which problem is that?” said Fenris.

“How they’ve tracked me here,” he said. “There must be spies at Skyhold.”

“That, there may be,” said Fenris.

“Spies at Skyhold?” said Dorian. “How?"

“Eluvian,” said Fenris. “Or, so I imagine. Is there another way to infiltrate Skyhold?”

Solas looked at him, a little glazed over, hell-shot. “I would think not," he said.

“This is what I needed to tell you,” said Fenris. “What we're here for. Why I contacted your Lady Nightingale after I heard about the assassination attempts in Orlais. This is no small faction of elves, my friend. It is a Qunari conspiracy. They don’t like your mage alliance. They don’t like this business with the Magister. They don’t like your girlfriend or her glowing hand. And they don't like you. They’re sending assassins, sort of like a warning. They want her dead, and you. If you won’t die, who knows what’s to come.” Fenris finished his drink, winced. “They tried to recruit me as their top agent. I went as far as I could without committing to anything. Figured the information would be valuable. Anyway, I felt my way around. The Viddasala of the Ben-Hassrath has gained access to several eluvians through spywork at the Winter Palace. A Qunari Saarebas has been experimenting on them for months. It is how they accessed your Keep in the Emprise du Lion, and, presumably, how they got in here.”

“How they got in here?” said Solas, looking around, as if surprised. “Then there’s a mirror in Kirkwall?”

“That is just a theory,” said Fenris.

"One hell of a theory," said Solas.

“Wait,” said Dorian. “Why elves? I don’t understand. If it _is_ the Qun.”

“The Qun is full of elves,” said Bull, “after the Blight and Celene’s purging of Halamshiral.”

“Indeed,” said Solas. “I’m sure our alliance with Celene has only emboldened certain factions. That entire situation was diplomatically convoluted to the point of indelicacy. Elves are easy to place, to pose as servants, cooks. They’re invisible.” He looked at Fenris. “Except for you, of course.”

“You don’t exactly blend in either, friend,” said Fenris. “You or your _Tall Red Elf_.”

Solas sighed. He looked at Bull. “What do you make of this?” he said. “Could there be more Ben-Hassrath at Skyhold?”

“Sure,” said Bull. “Of course. I got in the hard way.”

“Then Sene is in danger.”

“Sene’s not at Skyhold,” said Bull. “As long as she’s nowhere there’s an eluvian, she’s safe.”

"We can get the information to Leliana within a few days," said Varric. "If there are spies at Skyhold, they won't last long."

“Yes, but if the Viddasala has found a way to transport the eluvians,” said Solas, "then she's taking us for fools, either way. Because that should not be possible.”

“Why not?” said Dorian. “The eluvian at Skyhold once belonged to Morrigan.”

“Morrigan has a myriad of connections to Mythal’s magic,” said Solas. “It is no surprise that she holds a great deal of control over the mirrors.”

“Why would that matter?” said Fenris. “That she is connected to the elven goddess Mythal.”

“Because the mirrors once belonged to Mythal,” said Solas.

“How do you know this?” said Fenris.

Solas gave him a dark look, took a drink. “I just do.”

“Okay,” said Bull, diffusing. He reached for the bottle in the middle of the table. But it was empty. “Ah, fuck. Somebody get a refill.”

“We should head back to Hawke's," said Solas. "Figure through our next move."

"I have plenty of booze," said Hawke to Bull. "More than you could dream up in a single night, in fact."

"Yeah, you have no idea what I'm capable of," said Bull.

Dorian sighed.

Solas caught Fenris then, studying him. A familiar focus. "Problem?" he said

Fenris shook his head, leaned forward on his elbows. “I think I like you, mage,” he said. “It’s just taking me a moment to process.”

Solas smirked. “I have that effect on people,” he said. “Now, shall we?”

They got up from the table, all seven of them. It was a huge display of huge men, all of them moving as a single, seething entity not to be fucked with. But before they could make their collective move through the bar, there was a scream, from somewhere. A woman. She was holding up her hands and then clutching her face. She had red, red hair. Like Sene’s, only long and very straight. The piano stopped. Nobody was moving, but a crowd had gathered. Solas pushed through immediately, with Dorian. The two of them out front. When they got there, they saw the woman, and then they saw, on the floor, scribbled in letters divine, some sort of fire mine. It was small but extraordinary, and at its center, a black spherical container of the likes that neither Solas nor Dorian ever seen. Metallic. The bar smelled of burning plant matter and wood.

“He just left it!” said the woman now, looking at Solas like she recognized him. “He just told me he was here to kill the Inquisitor, and he left it.” She ran and exited the bar. Several people followed.

“The Inquisitor?” said someone. “Where?”

“Solas,” said Dorian eventually, down on one knee, examining the mine. “I understand that this a mine. Dangerous, but common enough. But this…thing. In the middle. What is this thing?”

But Solas was concentrating. There was an inconsistency in the bar, somebody with bad motives. Not just things like fucking in the alley or drinking too much whiskey. But murder. And in the space of his thinking, a curious man in cheap merchant’s clothing had stepped up to touch the mine. He was drunk and an idiot, but innocent. Nobody should be subjected to that kind of fateful uncertainty, not at a tavern in Lowtown at midnight, with all your troubles from the day behind you. Bull and Thom Rainier were herding people back now. _Back. Get away._ Dorian shouted for the drunk man to clear the mine, but it was too late. He had put his hand too close. The mine combusted, and then so did the Hanged Man.

Like ringing in your ears. The two of them—Solas and Dorian—looking at each other in some sort of desperate camaraderie and fiery mysticism. They had conjured something like a barrier, together, their minds linked in pure exchange to protect. But everything got so red so fast. The world, screaming and hot and mean and unwilling to meet you in your sacrifice. It wasn’t enough.

 

_2\. Chill, girl.  
_

“Right. Fuck. Shit. Ass. Cock,” said Sera. “Where _is_ the help around here when you need it. I’m dying. Literally.”

They were at the Gull and Lantern, in Redcliffe. They had only just arrived, but the night was already dim. There must have been some sort of impromptu Dalish gathering going on. There were Dalish elves everywhere—mostly men. With their vallaslins and without their women. They drank huge quantities of beer and wine, and traded cards for wisdom. Sene was pleased to see them and wished she understood.

“You are not dying,” she said anyway.

“Right, you,” said Sera. “Just thirsty.”         

“Shouldn’t we get special treatment?” said Dagna. The three of them, plus Cassandra, were seated at a table toward the back beside a lovely stained glass window. It seemed to depict a doe, or halla with sawed back horns. “I mean we did save the world a month ago. Or, you guys did, I mean. I just built the armor.”

“ _Just_ built the armor?” said Sera. “Solas had a busted chest and _you_ protected him. Not to mention the Quiz. Can’t see how yours is any less important than mine.”

“Yes, Dagna,” said Cassandra, leaning back in the booth, working her thumb into a smudge on her sleeve. “You are an indespensable part of the Inquisition. Without you, we’d be nothing.”

“Geesh,” said Dagna. “You’re all making me blush.”

“Here comes the waitress,” said Sene. “I have to pee.”

“What do you want?” said Sera.

“Anything but liquor,” said Sene. “Or…wine. I hate everything.”

“So, beer?” said Dagna. “Mead? Ale? Grog?”

"What’s a grog?” said Sene.

“I have no idea.”

“Weird having no men around,” said Sera staring at the backs of her hands. “You take to noticing, pretty fast. Men at the bar are so _hue hue hue. Whiskey me good, serving girls._ ”

“Who talks like that?” said Sene.

“Solas, of course.”

Sene laughed.

“ _Whiskey me good?_ ” said Cassandra. “That sounds a little…”

“A little what?” said Sera

“I was going to say dirty, but now I’m no longer certain.”

Sera snorted. “You.”

“I’ll be back,” said Sene, pushing out of the booth. “Get me a mead. Or a grog. Get me a grog.”

“Grog it is,” said Dagna. She pointed to the waitress, a small human girl crossing toward them. She had long black hair. “Four grogs!”

The waitress froze in fear.

“Let her get here first,” whispered Cassandra. “Don’t yell. You’ll frighten her away.”

“Whoops,” said Dagna. “I forget sometimes how scary you guys are to the commonfolk.”

“Scary?” said Sera. “More like _not._ No men, remember? Men are the ones who scare.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Dagna. “People look up to you here. They all think you’re the shit.”

Cassandra sighed. “We are _not_ the shit.”

“Yes you are,” said Dagna. “Let’s just ask.” She flagged down the waitress again, waved her hands high up in the air. “You! Hey, you! Are we the shit?”

“You’re such a widdle, you,” said Sera, and she pet her on the head.

“Just doing my duty,” said Dagna. Rosy cheeks. Starred. She pet Sera right back.

 

Sene had left the Free Marches on a strange note. Morrigan had decided to stay behind, for another month or so. She and Kieran were going to see to the blacksmith’s shop and supervise its transition of ownership. She was not ready yet to leave the farm or the goodness of this place, the purity. On one night in particular, she had told Sene of the blessed, hollow land in between worlds that she had once traveled to by way of eluvian. Kieran had been only nine or ten months old when she found a way to unlock this particular mirror, and there was a cottage and a crop of intelligent spirits and animals of the beyond. There they lived, in peace, for three years. But demons will eat everything, it seems, and she and Kieran were chased away, forced to lock the eluvian and leave for good. She said the Lavellan farm reminded her of that in-between place. No danger, and any judgment she received from the elves of Sene’s clan was the easy kind. After traveling the grassy, war-torn hells of Ferelden and navigating the high politics of the Winter Palace for so many years, she felt no fear in Ansburg, and she liked Sene’s mother, and the two of them got on very well, speaking in the language of the People and knitting by the window in private conversation while Kieran made friends outside. Sene saw her mother socializing with other women for the first time in her life. It was a sort of revelation, though she had no idea why. She was, in some ways, glad Morrigan stayed behind. Like it meant they would be friends forever.

On Sene’s last night in town, her mother made champagne cocktails and there had been a lot of gin and pink wine, and the Lavellan compound was overtaken by a party. Her father came around but only just, and Solas never really reentered the conversation between them. There had been moments in which Sene wanted to throw their true love in his face, but she refrained. She felt she had, at some point, overstepped her boundaries, but the fact that her father had not brought it up again meant that somewhere inside his thick backlog of lidded emotion he was searching for a way of acceptance. Her mother, meanwhile, kept trying to understand in her way, and she cried upon Sene’s departure. This made things very strained, but it was all right in the end. Sene promised she would be back in half a year.

The conversation she’d had with Deshanna about the land deal in Ferelden had been delayed several times. Always on account of his _schedule,_ but it finally took place that last night on the farm, with the rain from the previous week bringing humidity and some kind of freak heat. Sene’s hair got huge in its signature way, like its own creature of the night, and when she met with him, finally, it was out on the porch of her parents’ house with party sounds and music all around them, and they were looking at the farm fields and the wispy fireflies, and she crossed her arms over her chest and just told him the truth. She had no room anymore for niceties or games. She was leaving the Free Marches, and she needed some form of compromise between them.

“I know you recently purchased a whole shitload of land outside Highever,” she said, very quiet. “You did this without my knowledge, and I would like to know why.”

He had the Lavellan size. Deshanna was a great big tall specimen with high cheekbones, a lean farmer physique, and a salt and pepper beard. He was always dressed well, but somehow rumpled at the collar. He did not like to wear ties or suspenders of any sort. By technicality of blood, Deshanna was an uncle to Sene's father, and his children were her father’s cousins, and their children were Sene’s cousins, and far younger than Sene. The true Lavellan blood was dwindling out of this world. That was a fact. It was expected that Terys and Sene marry Dalish candidates of vetted purity once they came of age, as a way of keeping things clean and familiar. For reasons that were not always honorable, Sene cared very little about purity and heritage. She did not regularly acknowledge the existence or importance of her family line. She just wanted to be free.

“I apologize for the unexpected nature of the deal,” said Deshanna. He was leaning against the railing of the porch. His hair was long, nearly down to his shoulders, and dark. His wife had died ten years earlier of a wasting disease, and he had since remarried but he was never the same. "I understand your concerns. Know that I did not use your name to, in any way, intimidate my way through the negotiations. I never once mentioned the name. But your _name,_ Isene, was a given, a backdrop to the conversation that could not have been avoided if I had wanted it to be.”

“You should have told me what was going on,” said Sene. “I am no longer your da’len.”

“Trust me, I know that,” said Deshanna, like a knife. Somewhere, a child laughed. The nightingales were loud in the antlers of the trees. “But if I had told you, your Inquisition would have sent fifteen mediators to poison the negotiations. You don’t think I know how this works? That deal was a long shot. I never expected Fereldan nobles to sell their land to Dalish elves, but they did. They listened. And now, more will listen.”

“Out of fear,” said Sene. “That is not how I operate.”

“Not fear,” said Deshanna, surveying her bare face. “Never fear. Respect. We can still work together, Isene. That is the truth.” He straightened up, ran a bare hand through his hair. “Lest you forget your kind.”

This made her bristle. She got red. He had never been a man with a mean disposition, but he was so self-possessed, it could intimidate. Sene had never been self-possessed. This was the most _possessed_ she’d ever been in her whole curly-headed life, and this was as good as it was going to get it, so she just stared at him, and he stared at her, right back.

“What?” she said.

“I hear you've met a man.”

She rolled her eyes so hard it almost hurt.

“Are you a da’len?” he said. “Or are you the leader of a complex, quasi-religious organization in the south?”

“Get to the point,” she said.

“Is this a man you would consider marrying?” he said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t sit around planning my wedding, Deshanna. I don’t have that kind of time.”

“Are you serious about him,” said Deshanna. He put his hands in his pockets. An unsettling gesture, considering. "It is a simple question."

“Yes.”

“Then I need to meet him,” he said.

“You and everybody else,” said Sene. “I am not a business transaction.”

“You place very little trust in me, Isene. I have kept this clan safe and prosperous for the past twenty-seven years. Please do not make this personal.”

“He is not Dalish,” said Sene.

“I know that. Your mother told me.”

“He is a mage.”

“Your mother told me that, too."

"My mother?" said Sene.

"Your father would tell me nothing," he said, examining his fingernails. "Or, he told me I needed to speak with you myself. Your mother offered the information, to try and make things easier for you."

“So, he is a mage and he is not Dalish," said Sene, "and you still want to meet him.”

“This is reality, Sene,” he said, removing the cuff links from his sleeves and placing them in on of his pockets. “I have no intention of fighting it, or you, only of acquiring the potential cost.”

“The cost?”

“You are an asset to the Lavellan clan,” he said. “I had plans for you, before you left for the Conclave. I have already altered those plans, obviously. I still wonder, however, whether we are going to lose you permanently. If we are, I need to know, and I would like to know to whom we are losing you.”

Sene sighed, huge. “I’m not _leaving_ the clan,” she said. “You're not losing me. Why would I do that?”

“You’ve threatened to leave before,” he said.

“And you believed me?”

“Yes,” he said. “You are quite convincing when you're angry, Isene. Only before, you had no other options, so I never had to address the prospect. Now, you have options."

"I'm sorry," she said. She crossed her arms over her chest. 

"Do not apologize," said Deshanna. "I just want to make sure that you intend to remain a Lavellan, in some capacity."

"Yes," she said.

"And you intend to stay with this man."

"Yes," said Sene.

"Then there are responsibilities," said Deshanna. "I would like to understand what exactly we stand to gain."

“He has no intention of becoming Dalish,” said Sene. “I can promise you that. The situation is complicated.”

“I understand complicated situations,” said Deshanna. “I am not a fool. Marriage always comes with certain acquisitions and betrayals, no matter what. I will, of course, wait to bestow all judgment on this man until I meet him personally."

"And then what?" said Sene.

"Then we shall see.” He smiled, crooked but true. Sene sighed. "Now," he went on, "I believe we're through here, Inquisitor. Do you have further reservations about the land deal that you wish to discuss? Whatever you may have initially thought, know that it was a success, if I may say so. I hope you can see that."

"Fine," said Sene, still pissed off, but the matter was resolved. "I will smooth things out on my end when I return to Skyhold."

He nodded. That was the end of their conversation. Shortly thereafter, she was alone.

She got drunk and high later on that night with her cousin Terys in the vineyard. He had grown taller since her departure. He could look her in the eye now.

“It’s not that big of a deal, Ise,” he said as he passed her the joint. He made it seem like an afterthought.

“What’s not?” she said.

“Them all wanting to meet Solas. It’s good. It’s a good thing.”

“I was talking about the land deal before,” she said. "When I said I was feeling like shit."

“Oh,” said Terys, sort of laughing. He bent down, picked up a rock, and chucked it as far as it would go. You could hear it plunk into the vineyard ahead and the sounds of laughter and song behind them. “Right. Well, that, too. You’re respected around here, okay? For once. You need to just chill.”

She thought about this for a very long time. It was not an easy notion to master.

 

_3\. A Cure for Sorrow  
_

Now, in the Gull and Lantern of Redcliffe, Sene needed to keep all of this in mind. The Hinterlands was a great big well of existence, and after she came back and went to say a quick hello to the bartender who she had met on a previous visit, she experienced a moment of uncertainty when she ran into Abelas. It was next to the crowded bar. He was a huge man, as tall as Solas, but somehow bigger—like a barrel in the chest, and it had been dark out that night in Crestwood, and she almost didn’t recognize him now. She’d thought he was a human. His hair was knotted neatly at the back of his head, and he was wearing suspenders and a cotton shirt. When he first saw her, he had his hands in his pockets but dropped them promptly. He looked surprised and terrified and relieved all at once. His pale eyes big, his skin tanned from the sun.

“Inquisitor,” he said.

“Hey,” she said.

A man bumped into him from behind. This seemed to agitate him at first, as if he were uncomfortable with his size, his very presence in the room a confusion. He then looked around, shoved his hands back in his pockets, and stared at his boots.

“How are you?” said Sene after a moment.

He nodded, once. “I am well,” he said. “How are you?”

“Okay.”

“Where is Solas?” he said.

“He’s in Kirkwall, on Inquisition business.”

This defused something between them, that he wasn’t there. “Inquisition business,” said Abelas. “And you did not go with him?”

“No,” said Sene, looping the hair behind her ears. “I went back home for a few weeks. He’s there on his own.”

“Are the two of you no longer together?”

“No, we are,” she said. “It's just...I needed a break.”

“I see,” said Abelas. He sort of blushed. It was strange, she thought. To see a man blush like that, when he was so tall. It made him seem very young. “You left,” he went on. “That night, in Crestwood.”

“I’m sorry,” said Sene, earnest. “I’m really sorry, Abelas. There was this thing—”

“It’s all right,” he said. “I got your note. I kept it.”

“You did?”

He nodded, took it from his pocket. It was in the shape of a little crane. It flew into her hair. _You know how to find me._ This made her laugh.

“How come you never came to find me?” she said, holding it now, between her fingers. “At Skyhold?”

He was still smiling, but it was strained now. “I can’t go back there,” he said. “It’s—complicated. Please nevermind I said that.”

Sene stared at him, very closely. There was something missing behind his eyes. He was not whole. She could see her table from here, though the room was crowded, Dagna performing some sort of bizarre card trick for Cassandra. She would have got on well with Solas that night. Sera, Sene could tell, had seen it all before but smiled, and she was dreamy, nonetheless. The bard had begun to play a song about the coming rains of spring. “Are you sure you’re okay?” she said. "Abelas."

He gave her a look, his brow set and very heavy. His eyes were very deep. He said nothing.

“If you're worried,” she said, lowering her voice. “I know now. The truth. It’s all right. You don't have to keep secrets.”

“What truth?” he said.

“The whole truth,” she said. “About Solas, and about Mythal. What I didn’t know on that ledge all those months ago. Now, I know.”

“He told you?” he said, glancing up at her.

She nodded, unable to part with the whole truth. Not now. “Something like that.”

She gave him back the note. He studied it, then put it back into his pocket. “Would you mind if—” He faltered, firmed his jaw. "May we sit?"

“Sure,” said Sene.

She caught Cassandra’s attention and gestured that she would be right back. She followed Abelas outside. He seemed to like it better there, on the porch. No walls. There were several guards who went with her, but they stayed to the periphery. The two of them found a round table toward the edge of the porch. In the center, there was a lantern in the shape of an elephant, but it had gone dark. Abelas tapped the table once, and it filled with a most beautiful blue flame. He then lit a joint with a handful of fire, and he lit one for her as well.

“It is mellow,” he said of the elfroot. “It will not do much damage, Inquisitor. I promise.”

She understood. “Thanks,” she said. “I still insist you call me anything but Inquisitor."

“Right,” he said. “I know you do not like titles. I have been thinking of you as Ise, in my mind. But I suppose that is inappropriate.”

“My uncle calls me that,” said Sene. “And my cousin. You can call me Ise if you want.”

He smiled at this. They smoked.

“What have you been up to?” said Sene. “Since I saw you last?”

“I have been staying with a Dalish clan outside the city,” he said. “The Druanas, they are called.”

“The dairy farm?” she said. “Yes, I have met their Keeper.”

“He is a good man,” said Abelas. “Forgiving. I do not know what I’ve done to deserve it, but he lets me stay. I have tried to be helpful.”

“That’s good,” said Sene.

“Yes,” said Abelas, like he was trying to convince himself as well as her. “It is good.”

He rolled up his sleeves then. The night was cool but balmy. What Sene saw surprised her. The vallaslin—it was there, on his forearms. Everywhere. The little branches and pretty, spindly roots of Mythal. He caught her staring. She looked away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know—I didn’t mean to stare.”

“It is all right,” he said. He took a hit, let the joint hang between his lips, stared at his arms. “I haven’t—I haven’t really thought about it in a while.”

“Why not?” said Sene.

“Because it is ugly,” he said. “Not the tattoo. The rest. I bale hay now, and I herd cattle.”

“Do you like it?” she said. “Farming?”

“I grew up on a farm,” he said. “So, I suppose that, other than—other than _protecting,_ farming is what I know.”

“I didn't know that,” she said.

He ashed the joint. He seemed preoccupied with the ash tray. It was simple and made of blue-painted ceramic. “Ise,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Can you—perhaps this might seem strange to you. But can you tell me how he is doing?” he said. He smoked, his hand shaking a little. "Solas."

"You want to know how Solas is doing?"

“Yes.”

Sene blew out the smoke. Her head felt very light, but clear. “He’s good,” she said. “We finished with Corypheus. Since then, it’s been much easier to sort things out.”

“What…things?” he said.

She watched him. He seemed very nervous but somehow calmed to be with her. She was avoiding the full story—about Mythal. It seemed important, and yet, it was not important. It was not important at all. “When I learned about Solas's life before,” she said, “it was hard at first. I needed time to wrap my head around it. He needed time as well, I think. He’s been through so much. Like you.”

He glanced at her, glad for her interest, and curious. “And you forgave him his trespass?” said Abelas.

“Yes,” she said.

“Even though he lied for so many months? Even though he is the one who inadvertently placed that mark of despair upon your hand?”

It was sharp. She could tell he hadn’t meant it like that, but still. It bit her. She looked at her hand, opened and closed the fist. “It is not a mark of despair,” she said, hating herself for blushing. “Just because it is a mistake, that doesn’t mean it has to be the end of the world. We saved the world. You helped us do that, Abelas. It’s over, for now at least.”

“I am sorry,” he said, swallowing, shaking his head. She could see the lump rising and falling in his throat. “Ise. I am sorry. I am rude and ungrateful. I still sometimes don’t feel like myself. I never used to be like this.”

“What were you like?” she said.

He took a long hit. He held the smoke inside his lungs and then released it to the stars. He looked down at the joint between his fingers. “Something else,” he said. “I don't know if I was happy, but I was too young for it to matter. I was easy. Like you.”

“I am not easy,” said Sene. “I am a handful. Trust me.”

This made him smile. It was bright and strange to see. “You are funny,” he said. “Ise. I do not remember that from our time on the ledge.”

“Yeah, well. I was pissed that night,” she said. “I'm sorry for that."

“You’re like her.”

“Like who?” said Sene.

“El,” he said.

“El?”

“Yes.” He looked down still. She watched him through a cloud of white smoke.

“That is a girl?”

“She is a Druana,” he said. He exhaled and that was it for the joint. He put it out in the ash tray and went about rolling another. “It is she who introduced me to the clan.”

“Oh,” said Sene, leaning forward, putting her chin in her hands. She smiled. “You and El?”

He nodded slowly, sealing the joint. “I am…unsure. Of how to proceed.”

“What do you mean?” said Sene.

“She does not know the truth about me,” he said. “I cannot—I cannot even bring myself to think it, let alone tell her. I am unsure.”

Sene could sense it inside him. This desperate need to talk. It was like he was scratching at the walls, trapped. “You should talk to her,” she said. "She'll understand. And you should talk to Solas, too."

“Solas?”

“He is going through something, Abelas, just like you,” she said. “He could help you. I know that he would.”

He shook his head. “Solas,” said Abelas. “He came to me in Crestwood. He told me about you. I made him—regret? Question. He won’t forgive me for that. Solas is not a man who forgives.”

“Maybe not before,” said Sene. "But he is now."

“Before,” said Abelas, lighting the joint, smoking, massaging his temples with his great hand. "At night when I go to sleep, I still hear him."

This was strange. "You hear him?"

"I thought I had got it all out, scrubbed it clean. But I must have missed something.”

“What do you mean you hear him?”

He closed his eyes. He seemed to go somewhere else. He shook his head.

“Abelas?”

“Please, Ise,” he said. “I am sorry that I brought it up. I will stop talking about it now.”

She reached across the table and shook him by the shoulders, gently. This surprised him, seemed to jar him awake. “You can tell me,” she said.

“No,” he said, staring at her. The wind came in then, like it was hanging on a crystal—clear and winter colors. So pretty. There were wind chimes somewhere. Abelas took a very deep breath.  “I cannot. It is not in my heart anymore. It is over there, running away. I am trying to live a normal life. I would like be a good man. I would like to be free.”

“You are free,” she said.

“I don’t feel free,” he said.

She put her hands in her lap, became concerned. “Does the vallaslin still…sing?”

He touched his own face, smoked. “No,” he said. “It stopped some time ago.”

“That’s good,” she said.

“Ise,” he said. “What I said before—about Solas. It is not bad. It is just Solas. It is—”

“There is nothing you could tell me that would surprise me,” she said. "I promise. I'm through with that."

“Perhaps,” he said. “I know that it is me. It is not you.” He looked away. He seemed to be gathering his courage. “When Mythal died,” he said, hand shaking. Smoke. It was as if he had not spoken her name in thousands of years. “When she died, he just—”

“He what?” said Sene.

He seemed to be holding his breath.

“I know they were together,” said Sene. "I know that her death devastated him."

Abelas dropped the joint. He sat back in his seat and stared at his tattooed hands as if he were waiting for them to change shape. “You did not see,” said Abelas. “You did not hear."

"No," said Sene. "I didn't."

"This is what I remember," he said. "About the night I brought her body back to Skyhold."

"What do you remember?" she said.

"Just that Solas became angry," said Abelas. "He got drunk. So drunk, he couldn’t see. He destroyed the tower where they slept with a terrible magic. The smell was bad, like burning glass, if that is even a smell anymore. An explosion so high, you could have heard it for miles. But it was the dead of the mountains. Nobody heard but me.”

Sene listened, intently. She tried to remove herself, to disassociate from that kind of pain, but it was very hard.

“Nobody was supposed to know about them," Abelas went on. "Just me. It was just supposed to be me. But Ghilan’nain, she found out.” He nearly choked, caught his breath. “After, I remember Solas cut his hand on some broken glass. I know it couldn't have been much, but the blood seemed to be everywhere. And the sounds that he made. _Dan’lathal or’Fen’Harel_. They are seared into my memory. I thought if I removed it from the Well, the sounds would go away, but they won’t die. It is like they are a part of me. I hear them, every night when I go to sleep. Like a demon inside, feeding on my fears. I am a desperate fool. I should love El, and I know that, somehow, I do love her, but I just keep hearing the sounds. And then you come, and you take them away. On the ledge.” He looked at her. This went on for some time, listening to the crickets of winter. How they kept showing themselves at such fateful hours. What could that mean? "It is good to see you," he said.

He was smiling now, but it was like the smile had been spent out of him. Like it was all there was left to do, so he did it. It was involuntary. The air was sticky in Ferelden that night, just like up in the Free Marches, and yet it felt now like it should be snowing. Sene's hair was growing, and she looked at Abelas, and she didn’t understand how a single creature could endure so much pain and yet still function in the world, have honor, love. She had no idea what to say, so she said the only thing she knew for sure.

“Abelas." He seemed to be fading in and out of existence. “Abelas, Solas is all right now.”

He blinked, shook his head. “What?”

“He is all right now,” she said. “That is in the past. He no longer grieves.”

“How?” said Abelas.

"Time?”

“Because of you?”

“Maybe,” she said. “In part, but it was not just me. I helped him, but it wasn’t just me. He has a life. He has…things that he does. People that he sees. Like you. This makes it better. Does that make sense?”

“It cannot be that simple,” said Abelas.

“Maybe it is,” she said. "I don't know."

He straightened up, full of epiphany, it seemed. It was good. It was something. “Things and people?”

She shrugged.

There was no more smoke now. Everything but the pretty blue-lit elephant had gone out between them. She folded her hands on the table in front of her and looked at them and how her fingers interlaced with one another. There were people laughing inside the bar and all around them. Her friends and a great many Dalish men. After a while, she just gave in and looked at him.

"What is it?" he said.

“So, you grew up on a farm?” she said.

He looked at her, like he thought she was so peculiar. He smiled, but only a little. “I did,” he said.

“Me, too,” she said.

Then.

“Abelas?”

Sene looked up. They both did. There was a petite, pretty girl standing beside the table. She had black hair and was wrapped in a green shall. She looked nervous, but very aware. She was Dalish. The tattoo on her face was that of Sylaise.

“El,” said Abelas. He smiled at her as if he had never seen anything so beautiful. He took her hand where he sat, and he kissed it. Sene just watched, surprised.

But El was staring at Sene. “You’re—her,” she said. “You’re the Inquisitor?”

“What?” she said, looking around. “Oh, yes. That’s me. But please, just call me Sene.”

“Sene,” she said. “It is a pleasure to meet you.” She looked down at Abelas, confused. “You know the Inquisitor?”

“I—yes,” he said. “A little.”

“We’ve met before,” said Sene, smiling. “I am here with some friends. It’s not business. Abelas and I just ran into each other and thought we’d catch up.”

“Where is Ser Solas?” she said.

“Solas is on an errand for the Inquisition,” said Sene. “I’ll be with him soon. Have you met Solas before? We’ve been to Redcliffe many times.”

“No,” said El. “But my brothers have. Months ago, in the Emerald Graves. They helped him out of a spot, then the three of them traveled together for a couple of weeks, I believe.”

“Your brothers?” said Sene.

“Yes. Lahlas and Datishan Druana. They said he was injured or something?”

Sene’s memory came together all at once, knitted into a huge quilt. El spoke of that time after Exalted Planes. The very beginning. “Right,” said Sene. “Right. I remember now. He did say he had met some Dalish men. They were your brothers?”

El smiled, nodded happily. “They were.” She looked down at Abelas then. He still held her hand, but he looked lost somewhere, full of dreaming. “Abelas?” she said, very gentle and earnest.

“Yes, vhenan?” he said.

“I just came to meet you,” said El, “like we said, but if you’d like to finish catching up with Sene, that's okay. I'll see you at home.”

Abelas looked at Sene, and then he looked at El, and he seemed to be okay all of a sudden. At least for the moment. “No,” he said, very sure of himself. “I’ll come with you. Just give me a moment, okay?”

She smiled at this, at his agency. Her face was bright and young. She had a lovely mouthful of teeth. “It is good to meet you, Sene,” she said. “You and Solas will come back and visit our farm, won’t you?”

Sene glanced at Abelas. He was looking away again, way out into the blue nighttime distance of the Hinterlands. “Of course,” she said. “As soon as we can. I promise.” She had said it for Abelas, mostly, but it made El very happy.

“I’ll be out front,” said El. She kissed the top of his head.

He smiled at her as she went. Then he looked at Sene. “She is an archer,” he said. “Like you. But she prefers the farm.”

“She seems really nice,” said Sene.

“She is,” said Abelas. He looked down at his hands again, some sort of compulsion. "There was a gathering tonight, with the women. A new baby being born."

"That's why there are so many men here," said Sene, looking around. "They're waiting."

He nodded. "Yes." Then. "I must figure this out, Ise."

"You will," said Sene.

“And about Solas," he said.

“What about him?"

"I just—tell him that I am sorry. About Crestwood. Please."

“Okay,” said Sene. "I can do that."

“And I am glad for you, and for him,” said Abelas. “And you both know how to find me. How to find us. You know how to find us.”

It was like speaking in code. He looked at her across the table, waiting for something. Something important. She knew that, after all this, she could not bring herself to tell him the truth about Mythal. He was broken, but despite all the things he had just told her about the past, his present seemed to lack complication in ways that were true to his particular sensibility as a man. He was taken care of. It might take some time for him to see that clearly, but he didn’t need her.

She smiled. They both pushed back from the table.

He went into the night then, a big and magical man with his black-haired girl. An ordinary circumstance by any outsider estimation, and he disappeared from her view.

She wasn't worried anymore. She just wanted to go home.

 

_4\. Fools Like Me  
_

That night, Sene had a dream that she walked into a bar. It was not one she’d ever been to before. It was long and old-fashioned. A heavy bar with brass railings and fixtures and like it had been around for hundreds of years. The room was lit with a brassy glow. There were candles on the walls in the shapes of trees, and there were the kinds of red cushy bar stools that could spin around. She took a seat.

There was no bartender, just shelves and shelves of liquor and a big mirror, and she was the only customer. There was otherwise just a guitar man and a piano man and three lady singers who crooned out a song in the back corner of the tavern about being taken for a fool. Sene listened to it, content, drinking brown liquor from a clear glass, and yet feeling like she had been pricked in her spine. She was thinking about this time when she was a kid, and Ellas, her uncle, had sat her down and told her this story of a mage in Wycome who had made shapes in the sky with fire. He had called them _fireworks._ Fireworks. The stories were wild and wonderful, like whole cities and avalanches of color in the nighttime abyss, and Sene had no idea why she was thinking of them now. This mage had been some sort of traveling mage, a friendly apostate, and he would go from town to town and bazaar to bazaar, just shooting _fireworks_ into the air. Ellas said he had seen them himself when he was a teenager, and one day, he would like to see them again. The Lavellans were suspicious of magic. Not because they did not recognize it as a truth of the world, but because, for as long as the records existed, none of it had made it into their blood. They just never had any, and yet, they had thrived. The smaller clans they’d absorbed over the years had, occasionally, produced mages, but with the Lavellan bounty behind them, some had forgone the Dalish life and gone to join the Circles, and the rest married into other clans with a Keeper in need of a First. The Lavellan clan did not have an actual First, though if it had, it would have been Sene's father, as he accompanied and advised Deshanna on every business transaction he undertook. Sene had never known a mage, a true mage, not really, until Solas.

Of course, Sene now understood what fireworks were. She had seen Solas’s magic in a myriad of playful circumstances. But at the time, when she was eight or nine years old, Sene was a practical girl. She had very little use for drama. She had to practice with her bow, and to grow taller. The idea of something like fireworks was unrecognizable. It was so far outside her purview, she remembered accusing her uncle of being crazy and without his faculties. _You should see the healer,_ she said. This made Ellas laugh. Of course, it was not hard to make Ellas laugh. Terys had been there, too, had believed Ellas on the spot. Sene had needed to see it to believe it. Terys took so much on faith alone. She wondered if things were different now. She looked at her stupid glowing hand, and she wondered if she had changed.

The girls sang fool songs behind her, like some sort of omen, and they wore faded dresses with ruffles at the bottom. The lyrics went something like, _Because this time, you’re not getting through to me. I guess you must be running out of fools. Even fools like me._ Sene felt like she needed some form of catharsis. She missed Solas’s hands on her body, and the shape of him. She missed the way he felt inside her. She felt a little empty. She thought of Abelas holding his pretty, small El by his blue firelight and telling her stories of the days of old, her petting his hair as he pet hers right back, and she wanted to both cry and just to be with Solas. Abelas seemed so far away from anything even resembling stasis. He seemed like a frozen child, but he was wanting, needing to be happy. Solas never talked of Abelas anymore. She wondered what it was that had happened between them.

All these ruined men made her hate Mythal. It came on quick. And yet she did not know Mythal. And she did not actually have it in her bones to hate Mythal. And now _she_ felt as if she had lost her faculties, because there had been times when she seemed to trust Mythal. There was something about Mythal, and Sene knew that, despite the complicated thing they had going, Mythal's intentions were, somehow, pure. Sene was trying to imagine a scenario in which she could come to terms with Mythal as some fully-formed woman that Solas had, in his previous life—and it really had been a previous life—used to love. Desperately. So desperately. _Dan’lathal or’Fen’Harel_. The grieving of Solas. What a sad, sick story. It made her hair hot. She was not jealous, not really, not anymore, and she no longer felt as if she was a nobody nothing-girl in comparison. The woman had died. Sene loved Solas, and Solas loved Sene, but it was still hard not to make comparisons. It was still hard.

There was a quiet dragging sensation now, going from the top of her head, through her hair and down her neck and into her heart. It went over again and again as she listened to the girls and their smooth, dreamy singing in the background. _Fools like me._ All of this—this stupid stuff with Mythal and Deshanna—all of it might have been true, but there was something else true, too. Ellas would be excited to learn that Solas could make fireworks. Terys would as well. And Solas would be happy to make fireworks for them, because Solas was Solas, and he was, in his heart, a playful man, and she loved him for this. _Next time_ , she said to herself, trying very hard not to hate her family. Her mother knitting in the kitchen with Morrigan, speaking the language, still using her bow, staying sharp, hunting an elk on a Sunday evening after dinner. Her father and his quills and his shrewd, intellectual mind, as well as his born aptitude for distilling booze. The room had grown warm as she sat, thinking her good thoughts, drinking her good whiskey. Though Sene, despite being one of  _those_ Lavellans, rarely drank whiskey.

This is when she looked around and she knew that this was not a dream. Or, it was not _her_ dream. It was the Fade. This was Solas's dream, and Solas was there now, sitting on the opposite end of the bar. He had beckoned her here, to this place of his dreaming where the bars were old-fashioned and the whiskey was both clean and expensive. Of course he had. It had been a long time since they'd just sat and had a drink together. At first, she was very excited to see him. She wanted to give him some sort of news. She wanted to talk and kiss him hard. But he was swirling the brown liquor around in his glass in a way that told her he was solemn, and his face was kind of dirty, she noticed, and his knuckles were roughed up good like he’d been putting somebody’s lights out on the battlefield.

She became worried.

She got up and went to him, left her drink behind. She sat down in the spinning bar stool next to his. She could sense him noticing her, but he did not look up at first. Like he did not want to.

"Solas?” she said. She put her hand on his shoulder, watched him swallow the whiskey, pour another from a heavy bottle on the bar. When she touched him, she felt a tremendous heat. Like a blast. It was unnatural. Big, a lot of sadness. He looked at her then, finally, and his face was serious.

"Hello, Sene,” he said, and he tried to smile. He had a split lip, and he was still happy to see her. “Thank you for coming.”

The girls in the ruffles went on singing in the background. _Fools like me,_ they sang. _Fools like me._ The piano had kicked up. The world was dark and gleaming, and it was not right, but he smelled good and familiar, even in the Fade, and she missed him so much.

She picked up his face. She looked him in the eye. “What now?” she said.

He sighed there, her big elven man. "It is all much worse than we expected, vhenan."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Recommended Listening: The song playing at the bar in the Fade is "Runnin' out of Fools" by Neko Case ([spotify](https://open.spotify.com/track/6Q7QoCBNnYL6UDBygaoW58), [youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7VNkG7Mmio))


	48. The Garden

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What if there was just snow? Snow everywhere, cold and white, filling every distance? And I just follow my sense of things through this winter until I reach a grove of white trees. And she takes me in.” -Denis Johnson, _Jesus' Son_

I.

“It is all much worse than we expected, vhenan,” said Solas.

Sene leaned back in her chair in the tavern in the Fade. She did not like this place anymore. The air became cold, exposed. Like an attic, and somebody had left the window open. “What happened?”

“An explosion,” said Solas, pressing his palm to his forehead like there was an ache there. “At a tavern, here in Kirkwall. Some sort of magical, chemical reaction. We were the targets.”

She thought she had misheard him. “An explosion?” said Sene. The dirt on his face and his hands, she realized then—it was not dirt—it was ash. “What? Is everyone okay?”

“All of our friends are okay,” said Solas. “Bull took a bad burn to the leg getting people out the door, but he’s okay.”

“Who isn’t okay, Solas?” He swallowed more whiskey, picked up the bottle. But she stopped him. “Who?”

He dropped his head. “Twelve civilians,” he said. “Two Inquisition scouts. One soldier.”

“Fifteen dead?” she said, half-whisper.

Solas nodded. “More are injured. Dorian and I put up a sizable barrier in time to save most of the people there. Had we not seen what was going on ahead of time—there are healers, Sene. But more may succumb to their injuries. I don’t know.”

“Who did this?” said Sene.

Solas pushed the glass away, put his elbows on the bar. “A faction of the Ben-Hassrath. The same people who tried to assassinate you at Suledin Keep. They have declared war on the Inquisition.”

“What?” said Sene. “The Ben-Hassrath?”

“Yes,” said Solas. “I managed to sniff one of them out, neutralized him, quickly. But there was at least one more that had followed us there that night. He was apprehended by a civilian on his way out the door. Then, it was Fenris who…pressed him for information.”

“Fenris? The informant?”

“He is very skilled with interrogation,” said Solas. “I will give him that. The assassin repented in full confession. He realized what he had done and—” Solas’s eyes were very red and dry. “He gave us a new lead. Bull confirmed its viability.”

“What lead?” said Sene.

“The Darvaarad,” said Solas. “It is a Qunari stronghold, in Par Vollen. That is where the operation is helmed.” He picked up the bottle again. She didn’t stop him this time. “We leave at first light.”

“ _Leave?_ ” said Sene.

“Yes,” he said.

“Who is we?”

“Bull, Dorian, Thom, Varric, Fenris, Hawke, and myself.” He drank.

“Seven men, and you plan to neutralize an entire Qunari stronghold?”

“We are not seven mere men,” said Solas. “You know this. And, yes.”

“What about me?” she said.

He looked at her. “What about you?”

“I should be there.”

“I agree that you should be here, but you are not here, and there is no way for you to get here fast enough.”

“But it’s Par Vollen,” she said. “You will have to trek through all of the Free Marches, all of Antiva and Rivain. You’ll be gone for months. You can wait six days. Or, go, and I can meet you.”

“We aren’t going by land, vhenan,” said Solas.

“What?”

“We’re taking the mirrors,” he said. “Using the Crossroads.”

“Eluvians?”

“Yes. The Ben-Hassrath have commandeered a small network of them. They have a Saarebas, apparently powerful enough to command them, to move them around.”

“How did they get access to the eluvians?”

“All magic decays,” he said. “Over time. Magical locks, they decay. I believe the network they stole, they stole from Briala.”

“How?”

“I have no idea,” said Solas. “Spies at the Winter Palace, I wager. But they’ve been using them to get around. They used the eluvian in Suledin Keep, though that one had been there for millennia. But they also used one to get in here.”

“In Kirkwall?”

“There is a mirror in the basement of this very tavern.”

Sene looked around. The room smelled like fire and bone. “Can they get into Skyhold?”

“I don’t know,” said Solas. “It should be locked. Mythal tends it, constantly, every day if I am not mistaken. But I honestly don’t know. Word is on its way to Leliana as we speak. In any case, you should not return to the fortress until you receive the all clear.”

“What?” said Sene. “Don’t go back to Skyhold?”

“It’s too dangerous, vhenan.”

“What am I supposed to do? Just sit here, in the Hinterlands?”

“I know this must be frustrating for you.”

“Frustrating?” said Sene. She was in tears now. She stood from the stool and backed away from him. “You want me to sit in the Hinterlands, waiting to hear whether you live or die?”

“Sene.”

“You’re walking into a fortress.”

“We’ve infiltrated fortresses before.”

“Not without me,” she said. “I have to do _something._ ”

“There is nothing you can do.”

“A team of scouts can relay this information from the Hinterlands to Skyhold in less than two days. I can be there in four. That gives Leliana time to clear the castle. I’m sure that, after the Emprise du Lion, she’s already started taking certain precautions with her team anyway. You know how she operates.”

Solas stared down into his glass, his jaw firm, fluttering. “That is true,” he said. He relented. “So much has happened. Good, Sene. Order the relay.” Then, he looked at her, stern. “But you wait until the castle is cleared before you even attempt to enter the grounds. Do you understand me? This is no time for theatrics.”

“I will do what I must,” she said. “You gave that castle to me. I’m going back.”     

He sighed. He hung his head. The singers had stopped now. It was just the piano man, but he was packing up, getting ready to go as well. Solas looked at her. “I thought it was finished,” he said. “I thought you and I were ready to move on.”

“Me, too,” said Sene, leaning against the bar. She wiped the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand. “When you get to the stronghold, Solas, what is your plan?”

Solas shrugged. “We need to neutralize the threat,” he said. “Attacking the tavern, that was a direct attack on the people of Kirkwall and the Inquisition. We cannot wait.”

“What if it’s a trap?”

“I’m certain it is,” said Solas, “but they don’t know that I can control the mirrors. They don’t know who I am, Sene. They’ll be expecting us, but not for several months. The woman in charge of the operation is the Viddasala of the Ben-Hassrath. She seems to have gone rogue. She tried to recruit Fenris, a few months back, and based on his observations, he does not think her troops are numerous enough to give us real trouble, not if we do the job right, and quiet. We’ll take her out, make it clean. I’ll recalibrate the mirrors, and then we will return home, having left our mark.”

“What does that mean?” said Sene. “Recalibrate the mirrors?”

“I’m going to fix the locks,” he said. He swigged the last of his whiskey, looked at the glass, then he set it down on the surface of the bar. “I designed those mirrors, Sene. I built the first ten with my own bare hands when I was twenty-five years old. They are as much mine as they are Mythal’s, and I do not want them sullied any longer.”

Sene sat back down. She put her head in her hands. “I hate this.”

“I know.”

“When will I see you again?”

“Once we’re in Par Vollen, preparations all told, the operation should not take more than a few days. But I have no idea, vhenan. Soon.”

“Do you have a contingency plan?” she said.

“Bull has close ties with a mercenary group of Tal-Vashoth in the area,” he said. “They will serve as our very expensive means of extraction, should said means be required. I do not believe they will.”

“Is this our fault?”

He looked so tired. She couldn’t see past it.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“The Inquisition. Wherever we go, people die, Solas. Is this our fault?”

“You’re oversimplifying, vhenan,” he said. “More people would have died if we had not been there.”

“If you had not been there, then you would not have needed to save anyone.”

“And if the Inquisition did not exist, then perhaps all of Thedas would be in the midst of another Blight by now,” said Solas. “You’re losing perspective.”

“I’m just thinking like somebody in Kirkwall whose fucking husband or wife was just killed in an explosion. This will create more stress for Josephine.”

“Josephine can handle stress,” said Solas. “That is her job. In any case, they like you here, so we’ve got a leg up. You can thank Hawke for that.”

Sene sighed.

“Vhenan,” he said.

“What,” she said.

“I miss you.”

She became very quiet. He had put his hands on the surface of the bar and stared at them with intent. She put her head on his shoulder. “I miss you, too.”

“I do not relish this,” he said. “Having to discuss these sorts of matters with you. I do not like being Inquisitor. I know you don’t like it. I know that _duty above all_ is a persona that suits me better than it does you, but I promise, that is something I learned. Not something I am.”

“I know,” she said. “I do, Solas. I just wish I could be there.”

“For what it’s worth,” Solas continued. “I had certain plans, before all of this.”

“What plans?”

“I was going to ride to Ansburg,” he said. “Ask you to come back. To meet me there.”

“Ansburg?”

“Yes.”

“But I could have just come to Kirkwall,” she said. “All you had to do was ask.”

“I’m through striving,” he said. “Sene.”

“What do you mean?”

“All of this bullshit,” he said. “These assassins, all of the fear here, it’s made me see, even more clearly than before. I’ve been stagnating. That dragon fucked me up, and then it all unraveled, and now it’s like I’m steeping in my own frustration. But I need to know now. Are you with me? Are we together? Are you mine, Sene? Am I yours?”

She was surprised by his outpouring, but he seemed so measured, so sure of himself. “Yes,” she said. This was the one part that never wavered. “Yes, I am yours. I don’t want anybody else.”

“Then I want your family’s approval,” said Solas, polishing off the whiskey in his glass. “And your Keeper’s. It may seem like bullshit to you, but I do not want to wait anymore. I know we’ve been in a difficult spot, Sene, and we’ve been apart for weeks. I know that I bring baggage. I know that this has not been easy.”

“Solas—”

He shook his head. “When you left me behind,” he said. “You should know that I thought that might be it for us. I thought you might never come back, or that if you did, you’d be finished with me. That I had lost you.”

“Solas.”

“What happened between us,” he said, “and with Mythal, it all got very ugly and very out of hand. I should have told you about her sooner, and about me. I should have trusted you. I see that now. I am sorry. I have never once regretted us, or a single moment we’ve spent, apart or together. And now, I want to be with you, free and clear. I do not want stipulations when this is all over. Because it will be over. You told me about what happened with your father, and I understand that, but I don’t want anyone asking questions about my intentions, or our future together anymore. Because I love you, and I will not be made to apologize for it, by anyone. Do you understand?”

She was very quiet. She was churning. Stuff bubbling up in her heart that she should have been used to by now. Usually it was Sene making things change so quickly, making them bright, making them new, making the blue go away. But not this time. It intrigued her. “Yes,” she said, blushing right at him. “I understand.”

“Good,” he said. He poured himself one more drink. Then he reached over the bar for another glass, and he poured one for her as well. He handed it to her, and then he raised his glass. “To us.” He looked right at her. It was a mixture of business and pleasure and his signature focus, and it was bringing her hard into reality like some sort of rebirth. And yet, it was expectant, and hopeful. He was waiting for her, asking her to meet him halfway. It made her even more in love with him.

She touched her glass to his. “To us,” she said, her cheeks still hot. “You talk too good, Solas. It’s still not fair.”

He smirked, a little ragged, but still. He was always proud of himself for impressing her, no matter how often he did it. They drank together. The whiskey made her brain and her body hot. Then Solas put one hand into her hair, and he studied her like he used to. It had been too long since they’d held each other. They kissed, and then they parted, and Sene exhaled. He was there.

But she was worried now. It was like before—only more real, and it wouldn’t go away. She was afraid that he would die. That he would go to Par Vollen and never come back, and she would climb away into an obscurity of eternal despair, and all of this, these small moments of realization and contentment between them would be for nothing.

“What’s the matter, vhenan?” he said, like he could read her mind. “Are you worried about me?”

“No.”

“I know that you are worried. It’s all right.”

“Do you have to leave right now?” she said. “Can you stay?”

He put the hair behind her ear. He smelled like elfroot smoke and whiskey and all the good parts of a man. “It is still night. I was going to stay.”

“Good,” said Sene.

And the bar was safe again. They were alone again, touching foreheads in the Fade, and the Fade candles were pretty, and the Fade whiskey was clean, and everything was simple. They went outside under the stars, and they made a bed out of hay and silk, and in it, they undressed, and they made love very slowly, his fists tangled in her hair, pulling, his sounds in her ears as she asked him to go deeper, and deeper, and deeper. She begged him not to come yet. She begged him to wait until he could not take it anymore. Their sex was a superpower, she said, spilling into the sky and lengthening the night, and without it, time would begin taking prisoners. He finished when he could not take it anymore. He finished when she asked him to. _Come inside me, Solas,_ and it was slow to unravel. So slow. He seemed to go for hours and hours, and it was so pure that they could both feel it. Their pleasure one. The Fade was like that.

After, Sene curled into him and let him assure her that it would be okay. He braided her hair. She traced her fingers over his rough Fade palms. But it didn’t matter. She couldn’t shake it. The feeling that something horrible was coming for them both. Something big, and something horrible, and like the moment she woke up in her bed, squirreled away in the helpless Hinterlands all alone, he would be dead, and she would feel his absence so squarely.

At the time, it was crippling. She would not let him go. She did not understand yet that this was only love, and that the fear that her lover would die was typical, that it would never leave her, only that, over time, it would become just a piece of the scenery. Less like a scary song, and more just like background noise, and he would feel it, too, and they were in this together. It was just her eyes opening for the very first time—to this secret order of the world, and the way that it feels and seems and is when you’re in love. It is different here, and it is not all butterflies. She had been in love with him for a year but it seemed different now. Before, it was like being a girl, and playing on the surface of things. This was like planting seeds. She knew every angle of him now, the past as well as the present, and she still loved him, and that came with a sense of reassurance that she could not have foreseen. Now, she had this feeling of truth and union, like she would never be alone, and yet, that is the risk, the cruel irony of loving, isn’t it?

Solas was and always had been a gambler, and he was better at calculating the odds than anybody in the world, and yet he had already loved and lost numerous times, and if it could happen to him, then it could happen to anyone. Secretly she prayed that, with the death of his father and the death of his mother and the death of Mythal, he had paid enough of a price for love and now, he had earned his peace, and she, by his side, the woman that he chose, would be entitled to join him. Absolved of all tragedy. And yet, this was terrible and selfish and a bunch of bullshit. It was just her way of skirting the truth—that living was random, and there were no guarantees.

Perhaps in her new life, anxiety would creep its way into her sleeping and, on occasion, keep her awake. When you’re leaving nothing behind, and you’ve got nothing to lose, it is very easy to run as fast you can. But at some point, you accrue enough days and enough people and experiences and enough pain and exhaustion in your little life, that you start to finally see what is important. Like little weights, things holding you down, keeping you in place. And maybe, once, you found the very notion of _settling_ to be a thing of fear and boredom, but now you know that there is nothing more terrifying than the thought that these important things, these pieces holding your feet to the earth, that they might, someday, be gone forever. Because then where would you be?

There were no answers for this, as usual. She was not selfish. That night, in the Fade, she kissed him and tried to think of what it would be like when their bodies touched again, because they would touch again, she knew it. She had to. She did what she must, feeding off her love alone, running and running and running, and he would do the same. They would always make each other happy. That was just the truth of it. She tried to remember this when she woke up the next morning. She tried, but it was so hard.

 

II.

“So,” said Leanathy to Mythal. It was evening. She was holding the yellow watering can high over her head, tipping it into a hanging plant of iris. “You and my son.”

They were standing close to the fountain, which was wide and rectangular, made of deep blue stone, and the water was very clear in the Garden of Glory—the _Adahl’vhen’an or’Leanathe,_ which was located on one of the many rooftops of Mythal’s Blue Fortress in Arlathan. The garden was where Leanathy lived, in a small, clay cottage built for her by Solas who had been there earlier that morning, helping her install a new shelving unit in the shed. The old one had begun to form a rot particular to Leanathy’s magic. A byproduct of channeling the earth with such sincerity. The shed was where she stored the many potions and antidotes she brewed in contribution to Mythal's Sentinels.

Mythal had grown speechless. She began fussing with her gold rings the moment Leanathy brought it up. Satisfied, Leanathy just kept watering her plants. She knew her son. She knew it had only been a matter of time before he got Mythal into bed. She knew that, before, the only things holding him back had been status and age, but now, he was her General, and he may have been seven years younger than Mythal, but he ran her armies from the Backwater by the Sea to the heart of the big city and hundreds of miles in all directions, and he conducted all of her parlor negotiations, and this kind of shift in their power dynamic, Leanathy knew, would embolden him.

The garden was beautiful that evening, green, and everywhere. Big. Plants reached out and touched you wherever you went. The moons’ blue light passed through in long straight bars, and during the day, the sun would become a kingdom all its own. You could see the floating castles of Arlathan from here. Leanathy did not care to admit it, but being close to them, it was like being to close to Marin again—close to his magic. She could feel it, and it made her angry most nights, but it would do.

Mythal sat down on the edge of the fountain, wearing a long, pale blue dress with many satin straps for the sleeves wrapped around her spindly arms. Leanathy went about her work. “Did he tell you?” Mythal said.

“No,” said Leanathy. She wore a shawl of many colors. She set the watering can on a low stoop. “But I live in this castle, Mythal. Mine is a big garden, and the two of you spend a lot of time here, drinking, discussing your tactics. You always have, but yesterday, I saw him fashion a flower from behind your ear.”

“And?” said Mythal. “Solas does that with any girl.”

“No he doesn’t,” said Leanathy. “If you had been any girl, it would have only been a card trick, perhaps a coin. Solas has many little magics, but the flowers and the butterflies—those he saves.” She smirked.

“Please do not be mad,” said Mythal. “Are you mad?”

“Why would I be mad?” said Leanathy, dusting her hands off on her dress. “He is a man, not a boy. You seem to bring him peace at the end of the day, Mythal. I am not mad.”

Mythal breathed. She nodded, once. “It is new,” she said, blushing by moonlight. This tiny creature of tremendous power. “Less than a month. It is not something we planned for. It just happened. I am surprised he did not tell you.”

“I did not ask him,” said Leanathy.

“I thought he told you everything.”

Leanathy put a piece of stray black hair behind her ear. “The fact that he did not tell me only means that he is serious enough not to need my approval.”

“Is that good?” said Mythal.

“You’ll have to ask him.”

“He does not seem ashamed,” said Mythal. “He expresses no guilt. It astounds me.”

“The two of you have always been very close,” said Leanathy. “You need to give yourself more credit. Try to be happy.”

“I am trying,” she said. “I try all day long.”

Leanathy smiled at this. It was a very typical display of Mythal’s particular drama.

“He is younger than me,” said Mythal. “He will always be younger than me.”

“That is true,” said Leanathy. “And yet, Solas grew up very quickly. I can’t say that I am proud of that. But you know the story and its many heavy pages.”

“You kept him safe for as long as you could,” said Mythal.

“Yes, and now you keep him safe,” said Leanathy. “The world is changing. There is true ugliness on your doorstep, Mythal. What happened to Marin, fifteen years ago—all of that pales in comparison to what I see going on in the streets below. All magic decays, but this, your war, this is not magic at its core. This is violence.”

“I know that,” said Mythal.

Leanathy was quiet. She always held all of her weeping inside. She shared nothing in the way of emotion, nothing other than anger, displeasure, occasionally guilt. But never sadness. Never pain. These things she channeled into her magic, her art, the glass she made and the trees she grew. All of them blue or long and weeping. All of it, a manifestation of the sadness she would not show on her face.

“You could help me, you know,” Mythal said. “Help us.”

“I do help you. Every day.”

“I mean seriously,” said Mythal. “Not merely keeping in your garden, brewing potions. Of course, your remedies are useful. They are rarities, but you could have a role, Lea. If you wanted it. It is there for you. Your magic—it is stronger than this. Solas thinks so, too.”

“I know what Solas thinks,” she said. “He has made me the same offer time and time again. But I do not want a role. I am finished fighting, Mythal. You know this as well as he does. I fought an internal battle with my own shit noble family for ten years because I loved an architect from the Weathers. Can you imagine? Imagine what your father would say if he found out you let the Wolf into your bed.”

“My father is dying,” said Mythal, adjusting her bracelets. “I think he will be dead within half a month. My mother is in a barbiturate coma, and there is very little I could ever do to crack her complex shell of delusion. I doubt she even has the presence of mind to acknowledge who truly runs her family’s army. Has she even heard of Fen’Harel? If she has, the revelation would knock me flat on my back in the weeds.”

“You are a smart woman,” said Leanathy. “We have a great deal in common.”

“Do not flatter me, Lea.”

“Why not? It is an unfortunate truth, isn’t it? The plight of our kind. But it makes me glad for your company, in the end.” She softened. She took Mythal's hand, briefly. “I am sorry about your father, Mythal. I know it has caused you great hardship, his mental illness.”

Mythal glanced to her shoes. “I am not sure that it is hardship,” she said. “But thank you anyway.” Leanathy could sense her smiling, but she could not see her face.

She sighed, turned around and went to the shed. Mythal followed her as the sparrows chirped high in the all-encompassing treetops. It was humid, like the inside of a mouth and yet, somehow, comfortable. Once they got there, Mythal waited patiently while Leanathy removed her shawl and hung it on a metal hook. Underneath, she wore an airy dress of very dark blue. She lit a candle. The room was filled with jars and bottles, and the light was catching colors in the glass. Leanathy picked up a terracotta flowerpot and examined it for cracks. Mythal stood, alone, checking her fingernails. She was very beautiful. Her hair was very straight and shiny and a dark, even brown. She had round eyes and a full mouth that she painted each morning.

“Lea,” said Mythal after a little while in the shed.

“Yes,” said Leanathy.

“I love him more than I love myself,” she said, her chin tucked to her chest, desperately earnest. “I always have. I would do anything to protect him, anything to ensure his safety, his happiness. You know that I would. You can trust me.”

Watching her then, this child of snow, Leanathy wanted to reach out and pet her on the hair, to hold her close. “I know all of this,” she said. “And I do trust you. You know that I do. But it will help if you do not frame it this way in your daily lives, Mythal. Such drama is unhealthy.”

“What do you mean?”

“Listen to me,” said Leanathy. “Just live. Embrace your stillness. Do not rush the nights, and try to experience the mornings. Try your best at the mundane. Enjoy your time together. Just the two of you. The rest, the mean stuff, that will sort itself out.”

“Do you promise?” said Mythal.

Leanathy gave her a look. It broke the moment. Mythal was not weak, but sometimes, she liked to seem weak so that the people she loved would remind her of her strength. Her worth. Solas took her up on it every time. But that was a young man’s pride, because despite his talent and intelligence, that’s all he was. A young man. A difficult and yet, in some ways, painfully typical young man. Leanathy had stopped acquiescing to this kind of thing with Mythal years before.

“In any case,” said Mythal after she collected herself, suddenly very proud, “I planted a seed today. It was very complicated. I am currently exhausted.” She straightened the hem on her dress.

“Really,” said Leanathy. She put down the flowerpot. She had found a crack there, near the bottom. It would not do. “Tell me.”

They went back to the fountain. Leanathy put her hands into the earth and planted a whole head of purple sand daisies. Mythal sat on the fountain’s edge and talked, and a little while later, a handmaiden brought them a pot of rose tea and informed them that Solas had just finished with his training for the day.

“He is with Sorrow in the kitchens,” said the girl, her hair like a beautiful rat’s nest. Not unlike Sene’s, only blond. “Shall I send for him?”

“Leave him be,” ordered Mythal.

Leanathy said nothing. She just continued to plant.

Perhaps you are wondering how Leanathy could plant her seeds in the earth with her garden being so high up on the rooftop? It is a silly irony, I know, but the answer is _magic_. It is always magic, in the end. This was the way they lived now. Even still, there were times when Leanathy still burned with anger at the loss of her old house, when she forced herself to remember how it had happened. The day Andruil invaded the Weathers and started the Great War. How her scarred and tattooed men who came and beat Lea's nineteen-year-old son to a pulp, and then they carried her away. How she had thought for more than a week before Mythal had arranged for her extraction that he was dead. That Solas was dead. That they were all dead. There had been one short stretch of a moment in which, from across a great and crowded room filled with captives at the Wooden Palace of Andruil, that she had seen Ghilan’nain. And she knew in her heart, in that very moment, that the young girl would not last. She was just a girl, and she would ride her bike to their house every day. Every day. She liked the garden. She liked Leanathy. She loved Solas more than she loved anything. And she possessed great talent, but she was not strong. Her spine was weak, and without him there to protect her from herself, she would perish.

Leanathy would still sometimes grow cold trees from the earth in memorial and light them on fire, simply to watch them die. But she did not show any of this to Solas, and certainly not to Mythal. She was forty-one years old with her face tattooed in the song of blue and winter. She lived in a place called the Garden of Glory. Somewhere on the other side of this castle was the belfry that she would not visit—the belfry her husband had built for Mythal’s family twenty years before. Mythal would have been just a child. Leanathy had grown to disdain the passage of time, and yet she did not long for the past. There are worse things than resignation, she thought. She loved Solas desperately, and he loved her, and he would have lived in that garden if she had let him. But he needed escape, to find a way to exist in the world without her needing him.

It had always been his downfall, thought Leanathy. The compulsive provider that was her son. She loved Mythal, but she still held out hope that, one day, the bloodshed would cease, and he would find a woman who could provide for him in return—something more than castle walls, beyond worship and power and wealth and enchantment. If he was ever going to be truly happy, he was going to need a home. A real home.

 

Mythal had gone to Leanathy that night only to wander the trails and look at the nasturtium like she always did. She liked the nasturtium and all of its fiery, iridescent gleaming. She had not known that they would end up talking about Solas, and yet, they did, and the memory would stay forever present in her mind. Solas, she remembered, had been training a new crop of Sentinels that day. All day. For Solas, that typically meant boxing in a ring of solid silver, no magic, challenging them to land a single blow if they could. Whenever that was finished, he would then hole up in the kitchens with Sorrow, who would take out his artisanal elfroot stash, and the two of them would get fucked-up on very expensive whiskey and upside down high in secret. That is how they blew off their steam.

Sorrow had always looked up to Solas like some sort of mythological brother creature. Solas liked Sorrow, because in the ring, Sorrow was the only one who, with or without the taint of magic, could truly give him a run for his money. Together, they were less friends than comrades, but it was an important bond between them. Sorrow was only seventeen but host to extraordinary power and size, and he needed this sort of commitment from a more experienced warrior if he was to thrive. He was otherwise lost and a little scared—just a root and farm boy from the Backwater.

Mythal and Leanathy had been trading lessons with magic for several years now, it’s true. The two of them were polar opposites in many respects, and this made the territory for learning very rich. Mythal was like a daughter of the sky. She had only recently built a whole fleet of battle dragons from the matter in the air alone, all of them white and cold as snow, chained up in one of the old floating castles over Arlathan. Solas had begun to restore those castles, piece by piece, and to cast them with protective veil magic the moment he realized he was the only one left who could. This, for them both, was very useful. Mythal’s weather systems were beautiful and devastating, and she was groomed to such perfection, that her true power only ever showed in glimpses—demure, like she was, focused and elegant, balanced at the tip of a sword. If ever you were made to endure the full brunt of her glory, you did not live to tell the tale.

Leanathy’s magic, meanwhile, was like rubbing soil into the palms of your hands. Bits of glass and rock that poked, grass stuck in your teeth. But there was a specialness to drawing one’s magic from the earth, Mythal had always thought so. The earth was the source of all life, and though it was not as sleek or flashy or intimidating as her churning, metallic skies, it held a great many secrets of its own.

Now, Mythal still dreamed on a regular basis at Skyhold. She walked in the Fade, but she could no longer feel the pull of Uthenera and had recently begun to wonder if it had died. She was not sure if Solas knew, or whether she should even tell him. There was something sad about the loss of such a place, and yet also something hopeful. Something true to this world.

Once, while alone in the Fade and wallowing in despair over her death and abandonment, Mythal had wished for nothing more than to return, for revenge on the ones who had killed her. The ones who took Solas away from her, or worse, took her away from Solas and who made it impossible for them to be in love in the way she had always dreamed. But she didn’t care anymore. She had been a vengeful woman in the Fade, and this she remembered only as exhausting in its futility. Early on, after Solas left, she would search out young women from the safety of her window in her tower, and if they had been wronged by men, she would reach out to and appease them. She would send them her strength in the form of a seed, and over time, that seed would grow, but most of them had died by now, because that is what people do, and with them, Mythal's magic died, as well.

Elves had never really been immortal, not like the Dalish thought. They could get sick, and they could get hurt, and they could die, but in the ancient times, there had been things like seeds and sleep that, if you had enough power, which most did not, you could use to extend your life. Now, these magics could no longer be made. So, she would die, and Solas would die, and Sene would die, and Sera, and Sorrow wherever he was now, and all of her remaining Sentinels, the ones who lived through the battle at her temple—they would all die. Everyone she had ever known and ever would know was dead or going to die. But the fear of death had gone out of Mythal a long time ago. She had already died once, when she was thirty-seven years old, and that had not been pretty. She had no desire to live forever.

Solas had made the Veil. There had been a heavy cost. In some other universe, his guilt over what happened to the elves might have driven him to madness. But in this one, just like Mythal, he was freed by the certainty of his mortality, empowered by the circle of life and the miracle of birth, and she knew that, by his own fair estimation, he had atoned by saving thousands upon thousands of lives in the new world. By moving forward. That is who he was now. A savior of men who would all one day die. _What could be more beautiful?_ thought Mythal as she sat in meditation with her mirror. _What could be more gracious or giving or pure of intention than that?_

Mythal came awake then, suddenly. She had been seated on the floor with her hands on the mirror, in the little room in the garden of Skyhold, but she had somehow pushed through to the other side. All of this thinking, all of this clean meditation, and she had managed to unlock the eluvian. Somehow—like she had jogged its memory, like it finally remembered her.

Now, she was in the Crossroads. She got up off the ground and dusted off her dress. It had been thousands of years since she had been to this place in the flesh, her bare feet touching the cold of the stone, and everywhere was fountains and towers in geometric perfection, and the gray mists and the upside down sky with the white birds, and her mirrors. Her mirrors were everywhere. Some of them broken, and there were demons, lurking. She could not see them, but she could feel them. Horrible entities of all kinds. She suddenly missed Solas so much, she wept, though she knew he would never hear her. So she pictured Morrigan instead. It was a strange transition, but in the moment, it seemed right. When Morrigan and her small son had come through this way several years before, Mythal had been watching from her tower and prayed that she would somehow find happiness. _The world is mean and greedy,_ she thought. _But I am rooting for you, crow child. I am rooting for you._

Flemeth was the exception to the rule when it came to the deaths of Mythal’s great many seeds over the years. A woman of extraordinary power, she simply would not die, feeding on and growing and nurturing Mythal’s essence instead. Making it real, making it whole again, and in her, Mythal’s magic clung and lived in the very pores of her bones, and this was a strange circumstance, a thing she never could have foreseen. Morrigan, meanwhile, her daughter and the Well-drinker, had lived a life so merciless with loss and pain at the hands of evil, and yet held no anger inside her. She dispensed with it. She seemed to take life for what it was, and perhaps this was just the call of motherhood, but Mythal would never get to know that part for sure. Either way, these were her women. This—and Solas. This was her legacy.

Standing in the Crossroads now, she was frightened, but she felt more useful than she had in thousands of years. She had a form and a figure. Hair and eyes and nails and a dress that fit her body. She could wield a sword. Now, this revelation that she could awaken the mirrors. This changed things.

There was a knock on the door then. It was Madame de Fer.

"Are you finished in there yet, Mythal?" she said through the door. "It's been hours."

Mythal rubbed her eyes. She stood up. She dusted off her dress. She opened the door and presented herself. "Yes, I am finished."

"Good," said Vivienne. She was tall and intimidating, like most of the women here, wearing a long, silver skirt. She had her arms crossed over her chest, committed but suspicious. "Have you learned anything new this time?" she said. "Sensed anything...off?"

"Yes, and no," said Mythal.

"Let us walk together, my dear," said Vivienne.

She exited the room with Madame de Fer. Everywhere, there seemed to be sky and love and children and Chantry sisters. Mythal tried to stand very straight beside Vivienne and with her hands behind her back. She had to be frank and practical with the dispensation of her knowledge. Above all, she had to be fair. This was the new world. She did not have the woman's trust, not yet, but it was only the beginning. Together, they took a walk in the garden. 

 

III.

Sene awoke in a small room furnished with wood and rustic, green linen draperies. On the opposite side of that room slept Cassandra, and they were in a remote cottage near the Outskirts. The refugee camp had grown bustling with life and a market and two or three small Dalish clans who had come to help with the hunting, and the gathering of water and medicinal herbs. Sene had put out feelers for local Dalish volunteers months ago. She had no idea how many would listen, let alone join her cause. Some of them were Druanas. The room was cold. The fire had crumbled into something like a pot of ember. She got up, stiff and a little hung over, and put her bare feet on the ground. She went to the fire, stoked it. Cassandra was still asleep.

She wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and walked outside where two Inquisition soldiers greeted her with their fists to their chests. Sunrise. Somewhere, Solas was putting on his armor, wrapping linen strips around his knuckles while Dorian sat in meditation with his head hanging between his shoulders. Bull sharpened his axe, and Varric loaded Bianca in mechanical silence. Thom read a book, as he would often do in times of great uncertainty and impending violence. Hawke and Fenris would be there, too. Hawke, she knew a little—a big man of sword and shield, but Fenris she did not know at all, had only heard tales of his fucked-up history, his lyrium tattoos, that they hurt his skin but enabled him to reach into the bodies of his enemies and remove their hearts and vital organs, but he was not a mage.

The skies were clear that morning. You could see smoke rising from the chimneys in the distance out toward the farm, and she wondered briefly at the mental state of Abelas. She then turned to one of the soldiers, told him to fetch Scout Harding and went back inside where she leaned against a solid wood dresser, and she caught her breath and put on her boots and her thick leather armor, and she braided her hair, and by then, Cassandra was coming awake. Sene sat down to give her the full report. Cassandra held her hand. The relay to Skyhold went out within the hour, and with this, it was time to be Inquisitor again.

When Sene finally returned to Skyhold, it was inside of four days. They had ridden like maniacs, relayed horses at an Inquisition outpost before they got into the Frostbacks so as not to grind them to the bone. They slept maybe four hours a night. Sene was not sure how Dagna would fair on such a rigorous journey, but she did well, and they ran into no trouble along the way. All the world seemed at peace for the moment. At least all the world in Ferelden.

The Commander awaited her arrival at the gate. She was certain that Solas’s report would have arrived by now as well, and it would have had very specific instructions for him, and protocols for letting Sene into the castle per the all clear, and this pissed her off at first—the very thought of it. But Cullen was merely there to escort her inside. He had very little news—Skyhold was clear, no spies had been detected. Bull’s Chargers, lead by Krem in Bull’s absence, in consultation with both Mythal and Vivienne had been tasked with guarding the mirror at all times. According to Cullen, and Solas’s report, which included a full plan of action and debriefing on the explosion in Kirkwall, Solas and his men would be entering the Darvaarad in secret that very day.

Josephine met her in the Main Hall to discuss public relations pertaining to the attack. Four servants came to take her bow and her quiver and her jacket. Her hair had come free, was held together by little more than pin patchwork as Josie asked her to quickly sign off on her latest feat in Inquisition propaganda and to set a schedule for the week. The castle was full of Orlesians—some sort of mass recreational visit by nobles from the south. Sene wanted nothing to do with them, and she asked Cullen to post guards at her door, and she told Josie to postpone all meet-and-greets for at least a day. She hated strangers. She wanted to be alone. Meanwhile, Leliana stood to the right of the throne with her hands behind her back, surveying the room and its atmosphere. As Sene passed on her way upstairs, Leliana said nothing, just nodded seriously. Sene could see on their faces that none of her advisors had slept much the night before, and she commiserated.

Sene felt emotionally detached, and yet, she felt heavy, like there were sandbags in her bones. For whatever reason, it made her think of _Vun’in’eir,_ or the Day of Snow, which the Dalish used to celebrate the coming of winter. Usually, it consisted of the men digging pathways through the snow while the women made a feast of venison and root vegetables and a great many apple pies. It was meant to invoke majesty and appreciation for the passage of time. But because it rarely snowed with much intensity in Ansburg, the day was usually ushered in by rain, and instead of shoveling snow, the men would roll out sandbags to keep the water out of the sheds, and spend hours raking through massive clumps and layers of brown, sopping wet leaves. The sludge in the vineyards was considerable. It was less about majesty for the Lavellans and more about work.

This always somehow depressed Sene, the weight of the leaves and of the sandbags. Dead leaves and sand are not the same as snow. And whenever her father would come inside from participating in this “ritual,” he was just seem very angry, very annoyed, very fed-up with life as if the weather had sapped something essential from his heart. Her mother would make him a pot of coffee and top it off with a large cap of whiskey. This would bring him some peace, and then he would sit with Sene while the two of them ate their pie in silence.

Upstairs now, she took down her braids, and then she took off her armor, and then her shirt, all very quickly. She felt stifled, stood there, half-naked, hunched over the dresser, trying to breathe. Being at Skyhold now was only making her more angry, the frustration of inaction building up inside of her like some sort of panic until she looked up into the mirror, noticed a smudge of dirt on her face, and then she picked up her hands and slammed them back down onto the surface of the dresser, hard. It shook, rattled to the wall, made a loud noise. She felt better, but it was fleeting.

She heard a small sound then—a peep, fearful—from somewhere behind her, back by the bookshelves. She was not alone. She turned around with her arms crossed over her chest, pissed off and surprised, her face hot, and she saw Mythal. The tiny woman was like a sewing needle, standing in terror, blending into the draperies, clutching something in her small fists. She had been standing there the whole time.

“Mythal?” said Sene. She turned around, opened the top drawer again, quickly, but this time to find a shirt. She picked up the first thing she touched and threw it over her head. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“I’m so sorry,” said Mythal. “I just—I snuck past the guards. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“You snuck past the guards?” said Sene.

“I’m very small,” said Mythal, looking down. “Like a mouse? People hardly notice me here. They think I’m servant.”

Sene put her hands on her hips. She sighed, huge, and dropped her chin to her chest.

“I am sorry, Sene," said Mythal. "But I like the freckles on your back, if it is any consolation."

Sene gave her fast look, and then she approached. She noticed Mythal giving her a long one-over.

“What?” she said.

“That is his,” she said. “The shirt.”

Sene looked down. She hadn’t realized, once again. “Yes, it is.”

“They fit you much better,” she said. “Than they used to fit me, I mean. His shirts.”

“Is that why you came here?” said Sene. “To marvel at my freckles and talk about Solas? Because I’m not in the mood. Not today, Mythal.”

“No,” said Mythal. “No. Or, sort of. It’s just—I’m sorry. I get nervous around you. I say stupid things. You intimidate me.”

“ _I_ intimidate _you_?”

“Yes,” said Mythal. “You are very intimidating. Like a planet, or a huge star. You must know this.”

“A planet?” said Sene. She noticed then. Mythal was holding Solas’s old pendant—the jaw. It was a surprise, to see it out in the open again. “Where did you find that?”

“Oh,” said Mythal, looking down, dragging her thumb across the narrow teeth. “In a drawer.”

“His drawer,” said Sene.

“Yes. It is just—please do not tell him. Or, do what you will. I was curious. Seeing it again made me think of his mother. I miss her sometimes, very much. She was a pillar, Sene. She offered wisdom wherever she went. She was like you.” She turned around and went outside to the balcony, very quickly.

Sene followed. She stood back, behind Mythal and stared out into the sharp white teeth of the Frostbacks. “I don’t offer wisdom wherever I go,” she said.

“You are young,” said Mythal. “Give it time.”

Sene crossed her arms hard over her chest. She scuffed her boot across the stone of the balcony. “What happened to her?” she said. “Solas’s mother.”

Mythal looked back, over her shoulder. “You don’t know?”

“He has never talked about it,” said Sene. “I don’t want to ask.”

“Why not?”

“Because it hurts him,” said Sene.

Mythal had wound the leather strap of the jaw around her hand so tight, the skin looked bruised. “She grew ill,” she said. “It was nothing extraordinary.”

“Ill?”

“Yes.”

“What kind?”

“I don’t know,” said Mythal. “She would let no healer tend to her. She complained of no symptoms, though her exhaustion was evident, and she had headaches. She was bedridden for four months before she passed away in her sleep.”

“How old was she?” said Sene.

“Forty-two,” said Mythal. “You know she had Solas when she was very young. Only eighteen.”

“I didn’t know,” said Sene.

“Yes,” said Mythal. “When Marin died, she was only twenty-seven. Imagine. Almost your entire life in front of you, without the man you love. It is no wonder she refused healers, that she wished to die in the end.”

Sene drew inward. She could feel herself physically folding inward. She bent, put her elbows on the railing.

“I am sorry,” said Mythal.

“I asked,” said Sene.

“I came here for several reasons,” said Mythal. She wore a long dress of crushed blue velvet. The seams were a little shaky but straight. She seemed to have sewn it herself. “I did not come here to cause you more pain.”

“Please tell me why you came here.”

“I know that Solas is far away,” she said beginning to unravel the leather strap from her hand, slowly. “I know that he is using the mirrors to travel to Par Vollen to dispense with a threat on your life.”

“How do you know this?” said Sene.

“I spend a lot of time with Josephine,” said Mythal. “She likes to talk, and she is lonely without her bearded lover. I’ve also been with Madame de Fer, teaching her the ways of the mirrors. She does not like to talk about idle things, not as much, but she is briefed on the matter of my identity. She does not trust me, not yet.”

“She wouldn’t,” said Sene. “She may never, not really. But she has also lost the man she loved a few months ago. Things are raw. Give her time.”

Mythal drew quiet. The wind picked up and bit into them both. Sene liked it, the chill. Mythal did not seem disturbed either. “I didn’t know that about her.”

“Most don’t.”

“This world is a confusing place,” said Mythal. “Love patches together so quickly, and then it comes apart. When I lived in the Fade, I became attached to needless dramas. The will of a woman in love, it astounded me. I wrote some of it down out of boredom and frustration. I was filled with emotion that I could not express. It became twisted, as bramble in my heart. This made me a worse person. I needed a friend. It is important, to have friends.”

“I understand that,” said Sene. “I never had many friends before the Inquisition.”

“Neither did Solas,” said Mythal. She smiled, like she was serene, just for the moment. It was strange. She was so strange. “Even during our reign. It was just me, his mother. Occasionally Sorrow.”

“Abelas?” said Sene. “They were friends?”

“A little.”

“I saw him,” said Sene. “Talked to him. A few days ago.”

Mythal turned to her, very still. “You did?”

“Yes,” said Sene. “He’s in the Hinterlands. He found a Dalish girl there, and her clan has taken him in. He is hurting, but he is okay.”

With this, Mythal dropped the jaw. She brought her hands to her face, and she started weeping against the railing of the balcony. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”

Sene didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t touch her. Mythal did not seem like the kind of woman who liked to be touched. She bent down and picked up the jaw. She wrapped the strap tightly around it and put it in her pocket. Out of sight, it seemed to do less damage. She told Mythal it was okay. “He doesn’t know about you,” said Sene. “I didn’t know how to tell him.”

“That is for the best,” said Mythal. She stopped crying. “I should not be crying on your balcony over Sorrow.” She smoothed her hands down her dress, drying her cheeks with her sleeves. She straightened up, trying to present herself once more. “He is an adaptable young man. He will be all right. I apologize for the outpouring.”

“Please don’t apologize.”

“I came here, because I need a favor, Sene,” she said.

Sene turned around, leaned against the railing. She found herself staring into the cold, stained glass windows of Skyhold. They were painted and etched with feelings of love. Hearts and hallas. She had commissioned them months ago but never really stood around to notice them before. “What kind of favor.”

“How much do you know about the Veil?” said Mythal.

Sene looked at her. The question—it was out of the blue. “Why?”

Mythal took her hand—the left one, interlocked their fingers. Sene let it happen. She felt she had little choice, as if it were fate. “Do you know that it is crumbling?” she said. “Do you that the world has adapted to its magic, and that it has become natural order, and that, without it, there would be chaos?”

“What?”

“Piece by piece,” said Mythal. “The Breach was too much. And the anchor will kill you, in time, if left to fester. You are strong, but you are not meant to bear its burden.”

Sene yanked her hand away, held it to her chest. She became aware of it again, the magic inside, and she hated it, and she hated Mythal for making her think of it, and this brought back everything from before, everything else she hated about Mythal, what she had done to Solas, to Abelas, and for what had happened at Suledin Keep. She lost her temper. “Why do you say these sorts of things?" she snapped. “Why are you like this? Why do you turn everything into such a nightmare?"

It was regrettable. Mythal wilted. She took a step backward, and she looked at her shoes. Many many brown laces. She began scratching that place on her arm, compulsively through the sleeve of her dress. "I do not mean to."

Sene squeezed her eyes shut. She felt instantly guilty. “Fuck,” she said. “I’m sorry, Mythal."

“It’s okay,” said Mythal. She shrugged, very small, as she scratched. “Life is a garden, Sene. We plant as we go. I deserve all that comes to me.”

Sene took her wrist, gently, to stop her from scratching. "Try not to do that,” she said. "I didn't intend to be so mean. I’m just—with Solas on this mission, I’m all out of sorts. I don't have any patience left. I'm so sorry.”

“I understand,” said Mythal, looking at the dry, unpolished nails she used to scratch. “I used to be a great protector, Sene. Now all I am is a bearer of hard truths. It makes it difficult to find a friend.”

“Tell me what is going on,” said Sene. “What is the favor you're asking of me?”

“Solas knows that all of this is true,” said Mythal. “That the Veil is weak, and that he must repair it. He has not admitted it to himself, not fully, because he is so afraid of losing you.”

“If he needs to fix the Veil, then he’ll fix the Veil,” said Sene.

Mythal shook her head. “He is a powerful man. We both know that, but what needs to be done will currently take him more time than he has.”

“What do you mean?”

“He needs his old power back,” said Mythal. “Undiluted.”

“His old power,” said Sene. “Like what? Like Fen’Harel?”

“Yes,” said Mythal. “Like Fen’Harel. Only he is no longer Fen’Harel. You need to trust this, once and for all. I can grant him his power. I have figured out a way. It would not be permanent, not unless he wanted it to be. It would not change him. But it would enable him to fix the Veil, so that he can rest. So that he can enjoy the mornings, be happy. With you.”

"With me?"

"Yes," said Mythal. "With you. That is what he wants, that is what he deserves. I can help."

Sene stared at her, this earnest woman. “How can you give him back his power?" she said.

“It will not be so difficult in the end.” She seemed relieved, she pushed up her sleeves, exposing the raw place on her arm to the cold air. “I just need your help.”

 

Meanwhile, far away in the Darvaarad, Solas broke the neck of a Qunari spy in silence.

“You could just freeze him,” whispered Fenris, using a handkerchief to clean the blood from the handle of his sword. “You could put him into a block of ice with your magic. Why bother with his spine?”

“Broken spines are more permanent, right Solas?” said Bull. He was angry, but he was laughing. Dorian was pushing his palms into the wall behind them. In the last fight, he’d taken a cold hit to the jaw, and now he was very, very unhappy. They had cleared half the castle by now, mostly in secret.

Solas looked at Fenris. He took off his gloves. He had blood in his furs, and Hawke was behind them, with Varric, scouting for survivors in hiding. “All magic decays,” he said. “That is what Bull means to say. Though, I’m happy to freeze the next batch into beautiful flowers of ice, if it would please you, Fenris.”

“All magic decays,” said Fenris, sheathing his sword. “That is an interesting point of view, mage. Where did you pick that up? Or is it your own.”

Solas did not answer. Somewhere in the castle, an alarm was sounding. He ordered silence. Thom stood by, staring up at a convoluted statue of pure gold. Hawke and Varric returned, quickly, no new blood on their vests, and everybody stood at attention. They waited for Solas to give the word.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading. :-) -g


	49. The Treehouse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Time sealed her away, yet she is dwelling still, like one who sleeps in timelessness, at the bottom of a timeless sea.” –Joseph Campbell, _The Hero with a Thousand Faces_

_1_

Once upon a time, many years ago, Leanathy led her son Solas out to the garden by the light of the moon. Together they sat, eating rose cookies and leaning against the fence, looking at the glowing nasturtium, and she told him the story of his father and the treehouse.

“We were walking, barefoot by the sea,” she said, “and your father said to me, _Vhenan, I am going to build a treehouse._ ”

Solas, who was nine years old at the time, listened with intensity. He plucked one of the nasturtium straight from the earth. They were the only flowers his mother would let him pick from the garden at will. He popped off the head, and he closed it into the palm of his nine-year-old hand.

“So we walked for forty miles,” she said.

He looked at her. “No you didn’t.”

She smiled at this. “Yes, Solas.” She pressed two fingers to his eyebrow. “We did.”

He gave in quickly. He smirked at his mother in familiar fashion. He was an imaginative boy. He liked stories. He liked to suspend his disbelief any way he could. “Right,” he said. “Where did you end up?”

“There was a pool,” she said. “We had gotten very far from the sea. This was a fresh water pool, but it was the very same water. I could tell. It was like the sea had seeped into the earth and somehow purified itself. It then bubbled up again, fresh and clear, so that we could find our way. Like it knew we were coming. There were only bright orange fish in this pool. It was filled with secrets.”

“What kinds of secrets?” said Solas.

“All kinds,” she said. “Your father took off his boots. He put his feet in the water and invited me to do the same. He was so tall. He said, _Lea, this is where I will build our treehouse._ ”

“Have I been born yet?” said Solas. “In this story?”

“No. But you were made. At the moment, I believe you were kicking me square in the ribs.”

Solas smiled. He scooped one paw into the earth and dug out a single hole. “What happened next.”

“Your father built a treehouse, just like he said he would,” she said. She stretched her arms high up into the air, toward the stars. She yawned. She did not sleep much. Solas did not know how much she did not sleep. “It took him exactly one month. And then, we moved in, and then, you came out.”

He looked at her, suspicious. “I was born in a treehouse?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“Hmm,” he said.

“Your father built this house not long after,” she said, gazing at its righteous bones. “Right here. The treehouse remained, but we never visited it again.”

“Why not?” said Solas. He placed the little orange flower in the hole. He covered it up with a handful of soil.

“Because we had moved on,” she said. “It was time to move on.”

She was dreamy for a moment, lost in a dream. When she looked back down from the sky, Solas was pushing the soil from side to side until, from its blackness, emerged bright, fiery butterfly. He had made it from the flower. It was the first butterfly she had seen him make since his father died six months before. It fluttered into the air and landed on his knuckles. He admired it, proud, unaware of what he had done.

But then he looked at her, and she had started to cry. “What’s the matter?” he said, very concerned. “Should I not make the butterflies anymore?”

“No,” she said. She wiped the tears on the back of her hand. “You should make them. Make all the butterflies you want, vhenan. They’re beautiful, and they’re yours. I just miss him. That’s all.”

She had some hair matted to her cheeks with tears. He cleared it for her, piece by piece. He put it gently behind her ear. This made her laugh a little, this sweet child and how he followed his instincts wherever they took him. “It will be okay,” he said. Very fierce, very determined. “It will.”

“I know,” she said. She took his hand and kissed it. But she saw the fool in this, in her weakness. She would always try very hard to hide this part of herself, whether it was a mistake or not. She could not be the one who fell apart. Not anymore. She straightened up then, put on her glow and her happy face. She palmed his cheeks. “Let’s go inside.”

She kissed him hard on the brow. They got up together, the little butterfly in their wake. You could hear the purple sand daisies shuffling, and the coyotes lamenting in the distance, the soft wind.

That night, Solas would dream of the treehouse. He found the memory, just like she’d told it, and he climbed the ladder to the very top. It was small and warm and built up like a nest, very modest with little jars full of butterflies to light the room, and it was high over a clear pool full of orange fish. He sat in the treehouse of his mother’s memory, and he thought all about life, the endless blue thoughts of a nine-year-old boy who had yet to live much. He and his mother were planets, but they didn’t have a star. What good was it to circle a hole in the nothing? For several weeks after the funeral, she had not been able to truly look at him without crying. She would apologize, and he would say he understood, because he did. He was also a rational boy in many ways, and it was very simple. He looked like his father. There was nothing he could do about that.

But her sadness had seemed to find its footing now, six months later, like a thing she could manage in the day-to-day. Solas, however, could not feel anything. It would be several years before the anger kicked in, and before he began to feel the weight of the chip on his shoulder. It was not fair what had happened. It was not fair. That was the only thing he could seem to think now while he dreamed in the treehouse.

His mother, meanwhile, worked in the yard. She did not sleep. She did not dream. She was burying old parts of her magic in the earth instead until they purified and became clean again. She had begun to do this several times a week, because it was what she needed. Magic picks up your scent—that is what Leanathy had gathered. It becomes the thing that you are, your soul. And in the past six months, without Marin, her soul had gunked up, grown murky. It was no longer the clear pool in her memory, filled with orange fish. So she cleaned it in the ancient earth, scrubbed it as if on a washboard until it was like new, and then she stepped back inside her magic, pure and clear and cool again, so that upon it, one day, she could build a house made of trees.

 

 _2_

>   _“There were two mutant girls in the town: one had a hand made of fire and the other had a hand made of ice.”_
> 
> _–Aimee Bender, “The Healer”_

“Why me,” said Sene to Mythal on the balcony of her quarters in Skyhold. “Shouldn't you be talking to Solas about this?"

“I would if I could,” said Mythal. “Trust me.”

Sene became very suddenly pissed. This sort of thing annoyed her. She pushed off the railing and went inside where she sat down at her desk and began to compulsively straighten things that did not need straightening. Mythal inched through the doors, a mouse, and then she sat down in the heavy leather chair across from Sene. She seemed nervous. Once again, she didn’t understand what she had done.

“What did I do?” she said.

“Is this about me and him?” said Sene, fixing her with a mean focus. “What are you doing?”

“No,” said Mythal, shaking her head. “No. I’m not doing anything.”

“Then what is with all the weird signals?” she said. “You say you’re here to ask me for a favor, having something to do with Solas's power. Solas is gone. He’s not here. You said that thing about his clothes fitting me better than you, now you want to make sure that I’m perfectly clear on the fact that the only reason you’re asking me for help and not him is because you somehow can’t ask him. Do you see how this, in no way, incentivizes me to help you?”

“I’m doing the best I can,” said Mythal.

“I get it,” said Sene. “You knew him first. You loved him first. He was yours first. Blah blah. Trust me. I know. You don’t think I’ve had this exact same conversation with myself, hundreds of times? You were his lover, and you died. I am finally starting to come to terms with the fact that whatever the two of you had, it is, indeed, over. He has moved on. He is not going to leave me for you.”

“Why would he do that?” said Mythal. “He would never do that.”

Sene ignored her. “Me telling myself this doesn’t change the fact that you were, at one time, some equivalent of a goddess," she went on, "and you can deny it all you want, but you apparently had enough power and influence in your time to inform an entire culture of elves nine thousand years after your kingdom died. I had your slave markings tattooed on my face, Mythal. My entire family has your slave markings tattooed on their faces. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Sene. I am sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too,” said Sene, staring at a piece of blank parchment on the desk, catching her bearings.

“What are you sorry for?”

“I am supposed to be a leader,” Sene said. “I don’t feel like a fucking leader.”

“What do you mean?”

“I sent a man to do my job for me,” said Sene. “I gave up, and I went home, and I gave Solas the reins, because I knew he would hold them properly, and now, he’s in danger, and if something happens to him, it is my fault, and I’m taking it out on you, when I’m pretty sure you came here to help. But still, I just—I can’t find it in my heart to trust you, Mythal, because I know that you had him. I know that he loved you enough to end the world avenging your death, and here I am. I’ve never loved before. Never. I have no idea what I’m doing, and I can’t even muster the courage to bring him back to Ansburg to meet my stupid family. How am I supposed to compare?”

Mythal seemed rattled, but she did not break. She reached across the desk and took Sene’s hand, just like she did on the balcony, only this time with a great deal of confidence. Mythal’s hands were cold. “You’re lying,” she said.

“I’m lying?”

“About most of this. You know that it cannot be true. You know that none of this matters. You know that he loves you. You’re just making excuses for your fears, because you do not believe you are deserving of your fears. I understand this very well.”

“So what?” said Sene.

“So, despite this, there is one thing you got right in your anxious lament,” said Mythal.

"Which is?"

"Which is that you are not a goddess."

Sene laughed to herself, full of resignation. She tried to withdraw her hand, but Mythal held on tight. “Let go,” said Sene.

“Wait,” said Mythal. “Hear me. You are no goddess, but you also can't see that this is a large part of why he loves you so much. You’re real. You’re just _you._ You don’t hold him to impossible standards. You don’t worship him. You love him as a man, and nothing more. Do you view Solas as a god?”

“What?” said Sene. She had started to cry, but she tried to hide it. “No. Never.”

“Then why would you defy him and hope to be a goddess in his eyes?”

The tears were warm on her cheeks. She dried them on her sleeve. She knew Mythal was right, somehow. They sat quietly like this for a while, Mythal still holding her hand, in earnest, though at some point, they heard the screeching of a falcon outside, very loud and abrupt, and this startled them both, and Mythal withdrew her hand, tucked it into her lap. She seemed to fold very deeply in on herself then. Almost like she wanted to fold right out of existence. The thing that Sene did not fully understand yet about Mythal, was that Mythal was always plagued with an intense desire to simply disappear. Goddess or not, she was so embarrassed by the shameful mark she had left upon this world. Nomadic elves running around in poverty, wearing her blood writing on their faces. The others would have laughed at this, relished in their ill-earned glory, but not Mythal. Mythal just wanted it to be over.

“Are you ever going to ask?” Sene said eventually, straightening up in her chair, trying very hard to appear more in charge than she felt.

“Ask what?” said Mythal.

“You said you came here because you needed a specific favor,” said Sene. “So are you ever going to ask?”

"Oh," said Mythal, looking away. "It is about Lea, what I've come here for. Solas's mother."

"What about her?"

 

_3_

“We freed your dragon,” said Solas, taking off his gloves. He was sweating. They all were.  “It was no easy task. My associate here endured a bad burn to the horns. Perhaps you’ve met him before.”

Bull grunted. “You’re talking too much, Solas. Let’s get on with the part where we end this.”

Solas smirked. “He is eager.”

“He is nothing,” said the Viddasala, standing very stern near the edge of a long cliff. “You’ve burnt every bridge you ever built, Hissrad.”

Bull drew his axe.

“Patience, my friend,” said Solas, holding out his hand. “She speaks nothing of the truth.”

Bull looked at Dorian, seething, who concurred. “Listen to Solas,” he said.

Bull stood down in roaring reluctance.

The night before had been long and rank with death. It was a stand-off here now, in some far away land that Solas recognized but could not place. There were ruined castles floating in the sky. He thought it must have been Arlathan, but there was no way to know for sure. They had come through a weary eluvian that made his bones itch, and this is where they'd found her, the Viddasala, attempting to outrun them one last time. Behind her, at the very edge of the cliff, was another eluvian, but this one was different than the others. It must have been fifteen feet high, and it was perfectly intact, its base uncorrupted. It had never been moved.

The Viddasala, in any case, turned her attention to Fenris. “This is your doing, elf.”

He stood, lean, blood-spattered, hands behind his back. “You’re incredibly daft, given your mantle.”

“I should have killed you.”

“Yes, you should have.”

“This situation is very simple,” said Solas, dropping his gloves to the floor. He unraveled the linen strips from his knuckles, flexed his fingers. “We have taken out your reinforcements. You are all but alone. I am here now, on behalf of the Inquisition, to offer you a choice.”

Thom chuckled. He removed his helmet. He tossed it to the stone with a huge clang. “Here we go.”

The Viddasala watched Solas, contemptuous. “And how did you get here, mage?” she said. “So quickly. You came through the magic mirrors, but I do not see your Winter Palace apostate.”

“Her name is Morrigan,” said Solas. “And these magic mirrors are my property. They do as I ask.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard what I said.”

Something changed then, between them. The Viddasala, she became serious. She glanced to the eluvian behind her, and then back at Solas. “This one,” she said. “It is alive, but it cannot be cracked.”

“I have gathered as much.”

“You and your merry band of shitheads killed my Saarebas, but he once said that this mirror, it is wiser than the others.”

“It i _s_ wiser than the others,” said Solas, “and so are you.”

“What?”

“Which is why you are going to listen to what I have to say next, and you are going to make your decision very carefully. You may surrender and return with us to Skyhold, Viddasala, as a prisoner, where you will face judgment for your crimes. The _tall red elf_ herself will sit upon a throne of iron and decide your fate. She is a forgiving woman, but you’ve spilt innocent blood, and I have a feeling that she takes personal offense to this. Please bare that in mind.” He fit his bare knuckles into his palms, as just the thought of Sene, sitting anywhere, doing anything, excited him. “Should you choose not to surrender,” he went on, “you will die. We came here to neutralize a threat. I understand that our presence has taken you by surprise, so I will allow you exactly one minute to make your choice.”

“Your _tall red elf_ sends a man to do her dirty work,” said the Viddasala, drawing her sword. Thom, Hawke, Fenris, and Bull followed suit. “And she is supposed to scare me?”

“If you believe that is the case, then your spywork is very shoddy.”

“Meaning?”

“It is no wonder you failed miserably, time and time again, to take her life, and mine for that matter. Clearly, you do not know your target.”

This seemed to piss her off. She hooked a finger into her mouth and let off a huge whistle, loud and bright through the pre-dawn sky. At once, they could hear a number of men beginning to climb up the ledge on all sides. Like spiders down there, in waiting. Fenris bristled hard and Thom shouted for the swords to get ready. There was a lot of metal and at least twenty men coming up over the ridge now. Their hands were like spikes.

“You are a fool,” said the Viddasala to Solas, half-smiling.

Solas, meanwhile, just blinked at her. The sun was rising, and his men were prepared. He had his staff in hand. “Sometimes,” he said, his other hand balled hard into a fist. “But not today. Your time is up.”

“I choose to fight, mage.”

“Very good.”

He was on her in the space of a single second, picked her up by the throat and threw her backward. He bent the sword from her hand, used his magic to bind her arms, but she was strong, and she wouldn’t let go, and there was not enough time with her men on his men, swarming at this back, so he pressed until the two of them hit the eluvian and together, pitched straight through the glass to the other side.

 

_4_

> After all I'm still a jerk playing with matches  
>  It's just that he's not around to play along
> 
> _-Regina Spektor, “[Braille](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSK837O61EU)”_

Her son got in that morning at the yellow sunrise. She knew right away that he must have lost Ghilan’nain hours before, at some sort of party in the city, and she knew that he knew that she knew, and so when she saw him, she could only sigh. Battered, beat to shit in his hands and his face from the knuckle fights, looking exhausted. Too exhausted for a boy of seventeen. She got up from the table as he closed the door behind him and pointed in the direction of his bedroom.

“Sleep,” he said.

She shook her head. “Come here first. Let me look at you.”

“No.”

“Solas.” The way she formed it, it was not a question.

He stopped cold, defeated, leaned with his back against the door. He acknowledged her authority, but he made her come to him.

He was so tall, too tall. He had grown so quickly, like a weed. At her stature, she barely saw past his shoulders those days. There was something miraculous to this, that the little creature she’d created had come to outgrow her by so much, and yet, this is just one of the many undeniable truths of bearing a son. She went to him, where he leaned. She reached up to place her hands on his bruised face. He winced, but he did not stop her. “I’ll make a pot of ice,” she said. “You’ll sit with it, on your face for a while, before you sleep. Okay?”

“I understand,” he said.

He followed her into the kitchen then, finally. She lit a lantern. Before he sat down at the table, he tugged a loose satin bag from his back pocket and set it, heavy, on the surface in front of him. He dug the heels of his palms into his eyeballs and leaned.

She forced the water into ice. She kept buckets of clean water in the small cellar in the floor. Whenever Leanathy made ice, she didn’t know why, but it turned into a blooming flower, and she had to reform her energies to make it come out as anything different. If she thought about it, she could make other shapes—like animals, and castles. But the flowers were, for whatever reason, her default. Tonight, the flower she made was something spiky, like a dahlia, sharp and clear. She brought it to Solas in a wide, orange bowl. She put it on the table in front of him, wrapped a piece of the flower in a soft cloth, and made him take it. He held it gingerly to the left side of his face, which was badly bruised. She could tell his jaw was a bit loose. This was not the first time.

She sat down across from him, surveyed the bag of coin on the table. “Are you okay, Solas?” she said.

He sighed, huge, said nothing.

“Vhenan,” she said.

“What?”

She put her chin in her hands, stared at him with intent. “Proud boy,” she said. “You are not a piece of meat.”

“I know that,” he said.

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Then why do you let yourself become one?”

He shifted his limbs in the chair. He adjusted the ice a little, pressing it to his jaw. She knew it must have hurt like fuck, but he never complained. “We need money,” he said, looking down at the table. “This is the easiest way for us to get it.”

“We don’t need this much money,” she said. “There is money left over, Solas.”

“Not enough,” he said. “I promise. And this, my face, it is not as bad as it looks.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about your bruises, Solas.” She set one of her hands on top of his. Hers were small and cold. His were big, warm, like leather mitts. “You have always been a tough specimen.”

He half-smiled at this. She knew how his pride worked, that this would shine it up again, make him more accessible to her.

“Then what are you so worried about?” he said.

“I am worried about your heart,” she said. “I can sense it. Getting harder already. You’re just a boy. You’re not a man. Not yet.”

She studied him, and he studied her. As they exchanged their focus, she could feel it, the crying seed inside of her, coming to life. She would flush it out later, get rid of it alone. For now, she just pushed it deeper.

Solas leaned forward, with his elbows on the table. He relented and hung his head. “You do not have to worry.”

“Yes I do,” she said. “You are gone all hours of the night. I don’t know where you are or who you’re with, and then you come home, looking like this? What am I supposed to do? Who else is going to worry about you?”

He paused, stared at the wooden slats of the table. It hurt to love him. There was so little she could do other than offer him sanctuary, some form of guidance with a loving hand, but he needed his father. She had always known that it would be hard raising him alone, but this—what turned out. He had such will, such authority, such power and rebellion inside him. He was so angry. She never could have predicted that it would come to this.

She released his hand. “Go to sleep,” she said, tugging him lightly on the ear, a show of her affection. He wouldn’t look at her still. “I’ll have another look at your jaw when you wake. Okay?”

He nodded.

“Take the ice.”

He pushed back from the table.

When he was gone, and she was alone, she sobbed and collected all of her blue tears into a cast iron pot. She went outside, and she poured them into the earth, and from those tears grew a crystal clear tree of ice. She could have made it a real tree, but she didn’t want to this time. She wanted something cold. So cold, it hurt to even get close. Once it was done, and the tree was big and tall, she chopped it down and lit it on fire, and it burned in a freezing, magical way until she felt emptied and free, and the world smelled like winter, and then it all burnt off to a silvery ash. She thought, _I will not always want to be alone._

Afterward, she went back inside. She checked on Solas. He had collapsed onto the bed without even pulling the covers back. He lie still, on his back, a couple butterflies watching over him from the windowsill as he slept—little things he’d make for light, and she watched his chest rising and falling for a while. She then returned to the kitchen and made a cup of rose tea, and she curled up on the sofa and read from a book of fairy tales that she had kept from her privileged childhood, a book she went to most nights, like being with old friends she missed dearly.

Leanathy was so alone here. So terribly alone, but she could not find it in herself to leave this place, to find solace elsewhere. She loved it too much. She missed him too much. Sometimes, the neighbor woman would come by with some sort of baked good, and the two of them would have their lonely-heart’s chat at the kitchen table or on the porch. But this woman was, in certain ways, very difficult to manage, a busy body and, in a way that suggested a generational barrier between them, too curious about Solas, what he did all day when he wasn't home, and whether Lea was going to do something about the fighting. She guessed that whatever he did, it must have been illegal, and she wanted to know Ghilan'nain's story, too, and why she always had to smoke and wear a furtive scowl. _Poor manners for a girl,_ she would say in her tone. Leanathy could have smacked her.

These questions were innocent and foolish in their intent, but at the end of every visit, they filled Leanathy with despair. It was very hard making friends, thirty-five years old with a seventeen-year-old son, confined to your home by sheer unwillingness to leave. And where would she go anyway? Even if she had wanted to. Back to Arlathan? Walking the shiny sidewalks of the world she had left behind for a middle class architect who died too young. At least it was a big plot of land out here in the Weathers, she thought in vain. At least she had several acres to till and to weed and to sow. Even still, she was frequently taken with the irrational fear that her son would someday come to hate her.

Solas’s heart was so big, she thought, like a sponge, soaking in everything he ever encountered until it became very heavy. Everything he ever felt or knew or did, everyone he ever loved and the way that he loved them—it became a part of him. He would never leave her, not on his own. This she knew. She hated the thought that Marin dying had somehow ruined Solas’s life before he ever even got to live it. And so she wondered what was going to happen. It felt like something had to happen. To yank them out of this cycle. Otherwise, what was the point?

 

_5_

Solas bit it, hard. He ate shit, a literal mouthful of dirt. There was a struggle, but he couldn’t see or hear anything. Together, they had somehow emerged from the eluvian into the throes of a violent sandstorm. The Viddasala blindsided him hard with an elbow to the jaw, and he could sense her, feeling around for her weapon and quickly struck it to ice. But she was gone after that, scrambling into the night and the sand and the merciless wind, running blind, and Solas went after her, as far as he could, but at some point, he was on his hands and knees, coughing up his lungs, trying to breathe in the pitch black, the blue haze melting off the moon and bits of sand and dirt were catching in his eyes and teeth and nose. He beat his fists into the earth. He fucking could not believe he had lost her. He tasted blood.

His men had followed him through. They were the lucky ones. They went where he did. He felt Bull come out of nowhere, toss him to his back, hold him down, asking if he was okay. _Calm your shit,_ he said. _Solas._ Solas dug his fists into his eyes and clawed his way to standing. The sand was like an unfucked pit of misery and then he thought he heard Hawke. _Varric is injured. Bad break. Poison arrows. Where is the mirror._

“Dorian,” Solas let loose into the void. “Get a fucking barrier. We lost the mirror.”

Like a whip then, there was a crackling in the air. A huge unfurling of fireworks. Solas caught them with his own magic and wove a barrier on sight, in the shape of a net. It was clear and green and purple and settled upon them like a dreamy tent with a pitched ceiling. He saw Dorian, right away, coming toward him as the dust settled, spitting into the soil. "Good work," he said. Solas had both hands on his head, looked around, taking frantic inventory. There was no Viddasala. But all of his men were accounted for, there, inside the tent, and Varric was coughing in the dirt with Hawke hunched over him telling him to breathe, breathe goddammit. There was a bloody arrow discarded beside him, and it seemed that Varric had yanked it out with no thinking. The blood was pooling on his pant leg, upper left, and Bull was there now and tore it open from the bottom up. The wound was dark. Varric was holding his leg and swearing as Bull got down on one knee and told him to hold still. He looked back at Solas. Solas was, for the moment, terrified of what had become.

“I can clean this thing up and bandage it," said Bull, "but there’s poison.”

“How bad.”

“I don't know.”

“Is there enough time to wait out the storm, or does he need an antidote now.”

Bull studied the wound, looked at Hawke. “Should be okay,” he said. “I’ve got a poultice to take the edge off, treat the immediate spread.”

“Then get on with it, Tiny,” grunted Varric. "This shit is burning up my system fast."

Solas turned around then. Fenris was there. He was a smaller man than Solas, but he was not small. He would have matched Sene in height easily. “Did you see anything, which direction she went?” said Fenris.

“No,” said Solas. “I did not. But when you came through the mirror, Fenris, how many fighters were left?”

“Dorian detonated some sort of fire mine in our wake. I have no idea if that left anybody alive. Possibly a few.”

“The moment this clears,” said Solas, “you and Hawke will get Varric back to Skyhold. We will hunt the Viddasala.”

“Do you even know where we are?”

Solas looked around, hands on his hips. “I have no idea.”

“Well, that’s cheery.”

“Get some rest,” said Solas. “You’ve done well here.”

Fenris bit down on something, looked away. “Thank you.”

“Solas,” said Thom, approaching from behind.

“Yes, Thom.”

“Dorian is building a fire,” he reported. “One of those fancy magic ones with no smoke.”

“Are there rations?”

“We’ve got meager rations, but enough to get us through the night, assuming it even is night, and not just this bloody storm blotting out the sun.” He had some blood on his shoulder. It looked like he’d been lashed pretty good by an enemy sword. “In any case, I think we’ll survive for the time being.”

“Thank you, Thom,” said Solas. He gestured to the wound. “Tie that off. Don’t let it fester.”

Thom nodded. “On your orders.”

Solas was alone now as the men scattered to their duties, took off their armor and left it to scrap. He dropped his head back, closed his eyes, and tried to feel out their location. They’d come through that mirror at the top of the ledge. The tall, wise mirror, but other than that, he just couldn’t remember. Anything. His brain was all fucked up with adrenaline, and he couldn’t remember, and it was all he could do right now to just look around and get the air back into his lungs and thank mercy nobody was dead.

 

_6_

Dorian built a fire with no smoke, just like Thom had said. Bull watched him go about this, fixed with pure wonder. It was still easy for him to get lost in the amazement of small, pretty magics, and in a way, this made him a little like Sene. They sat around, passed a flask in relative silence, partook in meager rations that Thom cooked over the fire. Varric’s breathing was all right. Solas used a spell, like a magical tourniquet, to staunch the flow of the poison from the wound in his thigh, but even combined with Bull's healing poultice, it would not last forever.

They were all very used to this kind of thing, and so it seemed to make no difference—the mysterious locale, or where it was they were headed, or where they were coming from, or the blood on the bandages or the strong smell of Bull’s antiseptic soaking their wounds. Hawke lie on his stomach with his arm slung loosely around Fenris. Fenris stared at the ceiling, fixed, pensive. Bull leaned, and Dorian leaned beside him, and Thom sat at the fire, whittling toothpicks. He gave a handful to Solas who set one in his mouth and put the rest in his pocket and sat across from him at a good distance, his elbows resting on his knees, staring out through the clear green walls of the tent he had constructed from energies in the Veil.

It was night here. That part was definitive, which meant time worked differently. They were very far from  home. After a little while, Dorian came and sat beside him. Outside, the wind still raged and whistled against the terrain.

“How far do you think we’ve come?” he said. “From the mirror.”

“Not far,” said Solas. “It’s there. Varric will be all right.”

“Solas.”

“Yes, Dorian.”

“The Viddasala said something back there," he said. "I wanted to ask about it.”

“Which part?” said Solas.

“The part about the mirror—the one we came through—it being _wiser_ than the others. What does that mean?”

Solas found a dried reed in the freezing soil, began shredding it between his fingers. “I’m trying to remember,” said Solas. “What, exactly, it is she is referring to. You’d think I would, but time has taken a great deal from me. I repressed a lot of that for many years. It's slow to surface.”

“It was taller than the others,” said Dorian. “Bigger. Much more robust. If that does anything to jog your memory. Some of these other mirrors we’ve seen, it’s clear they’ve been moved, their wiring junked. They were flimsy, but not this one.”

“It did not patch us through the Crossroads,” said Solas, discarding the reed. “This means it may have been one of the original ten I built myself. It’s true they were larger, but I thought they had all been destroyed a long time ago. If this is the case, however, the ramifications of where we are, and where we just were…” He trailed off.

“Solas?"

"It would just mean that we have come a very long way, and by sheer accident, and I am still learning how to actively grapple with things like sheer accidents."

Dorian sensed his uneasiness then. He knew that Solas did not like to be surprised by things he could not predict. He changed his course of questioning. “You say there were ten?” he said. “Of these original mirrors.”

“Yes. Ten,” said Solas.

“Where we they? Where did you build them? Maybe that could help us pinpoint our location.”

“Half of them were at Skyhold,” said Solas, taking the toothpick from his mouth, examining its splinted edges. “But those were consumed when I built the Veil.”

“Where were the other five?”

“At Mythal’s castle," said Solas, "in Arlathan.”

Dorian looked around. Everything dropped right off a cliff. They were far enough away from the other men, and even still, he lowered his voice. “You think we may be in Arlathan?”

“No,” said Solas. “I think we _were_ in Arlathan, out on that ledge. I thought so, the moment we got there. Now, we are somewhere else.”

“I thought Arlathan was all forests,” said Dorian, “haunted with the ghosts of ancient elves past, angry spirits and all that.”

“Those are myths,” said Solas, flicking the toothpick to the dirt. “Your ancestors invented a great many, as any scavenging nation would to make sense of what was lost before they got there. And who knows. There may have been spirits somewhere, in the valley below. Arlathan was massive. High and low. That much, I remember.”

“Where else did the mirrors lead?” said Dorian.

Solas sighed. “A mirror like that,” he said, "it lead to only one of three places. Skyhold, Mythal’s fortress, or the Backwater.”

“The Backwater?”

“That’s where we must be,” he said. “I am loathe to admit it, but it has to be. It cannot be anywhere else.”

“What is the Backwater?"

“A ways outside of Arlathan,” said Solas, the memories coming back to him now, slowly but surely. “It was the home of a Sentinel outpost. It was close to the Weathers, which is where I grew up. But the terrain was all burnt out. Our enemies left it alone, so we moved in the refugees. Freed slaves in need of protection, men and women and children who could not defend themselves. I hid several mirrors there, in the Backwater, mostly for personal use. Mythal and I would traverse them to check on Abelas at the outpost, and our people.”

Dorian was very quiet. He folded his hands together. “Why couldn't the Saarebas corrupt it, Solas? He was able to corrupt and destroy many others."

“Because the first prototypes were rugged,” said Solas. “They were less elegant, less malleable, but they were also heavier and fuller in their defenses. They have only been infiltrated once, and when they were, it was because the infiltrators had been given a key.” He sighed, heavily. He wanted to go home. “In any case, none of this matters.”           

“Why wouldn’t it matter?” said Dorian. “The Viddasala can’t have gotten far. We will find her, and we will end this, and we will figure out where we are in the meantime.” He clapped his hand to Solas’s back, gave him a nudge. “Be calm my friend. We’re almost finished here.”

Solas tried to smile. He thought briefly of Sene and the bones of her wrists. His mind had many idle habits, and one of them was to home in on strange, unexpected parts of her. Sometimes, he saw parts of Mythal, too, and Ghilan’nain, but it was all very separate from sex or want, regardless. It was like his brain, cataloguing the passing day in the shapes of his many women. There were occasions when he saw his mother’s hands on her pottery wheel, or digging in the wet soil outside their house. He didn’t see her, just her hands, like a flash. He watched Thom and his whittling now, a mesmerizing show and filled with concentration. Is this all men were? Just pieces of the past, floating around like body parts in an old river. He wanted to tell this to Dorian, but there was nothing to say.

“We should sleep,” he said.

“I agree,” said Dorian. "Tomorrow, we make our move."

Together, they conjured threadbare pillows, and all seven of them slept through the storm. It was a renewing process. The wind blowing all around was lulling, and there were no disturbances. Just the crackling of the fire and their breathing. They were all exhausted. Somewhere, out there in the nothingness, the Viddasala was alone, weaponless, no magic. It was possible that death would find her by exposure before any of them. His talk with Dorian, it was like the past, coming for him, hard. Demanding blood, and he didn't know if he was ready. He'd thought he was. But living somewhere in his memory were just these long stretches of farm that went all the way to the tide pools. There were the beaches where he had used to go with Ghilan’nain, where she would turn citrus fruits into tiny sea creatures for a laugh and let him kiss her in the sand, next to the waves, all day long. That had been something. There was Mythal, the perfect arch of her cheekbones as she sadly discussed with him the nature of his mother’s magic, or her father’s illness, or Abelas and his potential. They were always somewhere close to home when there were mirrors. It was why they'd built them.

She was a beautiful woman, Mythal. Very beautiful, and she always had been. Like a High Priestess of Winter. Men and women both wanted her wherever she went. But it was whenever she stood with her back to the vanity, and had her hair down, and she was wearing his clothes or nothing at all. That is when he liked her best in those days. In the mornings. He could never make her understand this, but it was true, and when she was lost to him, these pictures, these images of her undone in the mornings, they were the thing that took the longest to shake. But everything was pure now, and so was he. He found awareness. He reached for Sene in the Fade, but she was nowhere. That’s okay, he thought. She was awake, wherever she was, going about her place in the world, doing whatever she was doing. Just living. Even when she was not with him, she still lived, all the same, and that was a comfort.

That night, Solas dreamed of a woman holding a child in a sling, standing at the edge of a very steep cliff. He felt no fear, just a bit of winter in his bones and it had started to rain. The woman looked familiar. At first, he thought it was Morrigan, but then he came to realize that it was probably his mother. They looked so much alike from a distance, it could be difficult to tell. He waved to her either way, and she smiled. _Come here, vhenan,_ she seemed to say, _Come here and let me look at you._  

_7  
_

The night before the slavers came, it rained in the Weathers. Leanathy had left a basin in the garden that filled and filled and filled, and like pellets on the roof—it rained all night long. Solas and Ghilan’nain were in his bedroom, asleep. It was very late. They had come home from the city together, all wrapped up in each other’s arms and Leanathy pretended to be asleep so as to give them their privacy. She was so glad they came home. They came home a lot in those days, the two of them, together. It had seemed that, since their relationship evolved to something more than simple friends, Solas had less to prove. The validation of Ghil’s persistent presence in his life had turned out to be enough for him. At least for now. And though she thought in her heart that Ghil probably loved Solas more than Solas loved Ghil—at least in the romantic sense, Solas was happy with her, and Ghil knew how to deal with him, which was a knowledge few women would ever possess.

Sometime during the week before, Ghil’s mother had shown up on her doorstep demanding to know whether Leanathy knew what was going on between her daughter and Solas. She had high expectations for Ghilan’nain. She wanted her to marry up in the world. She thought Leanathy would understand this, but Leanathy told her to fuck right off, and to leave her property, and that if she prized her daugher with such high earnestness, then perhaps she should have instilled a bit more confidence in the girl early on in life. _My son and I are not your scapegoats in the realm of mediocrity,_ she said. _Speak with me when your blood glitters blue. Then perhaps we can talk about what, exactly, it means to marry up._

That night, after the rain had stopped and she could sense that the two of them had dropped off to sleep, Leanathy went outside to the basin that had filled with cool rainwater in the garden. She got onto her knees, and she put her hands in, stretched all the way to the bottom, and she submerged her whole head and held her breath for as long as she could. Doing this—it revived her for hours at a time. It planted forgiveness in her blood, and it made her a better person. When she came out, she gasped for air and looked up at the rain, and she was happy to be alive. It was a strange renewal.

Solas was nineteen and still a bit of a stubborn asshole, but she was finally starting to sense the man in him. That man was in there, humming and growing, day by day, and she looked at her son and she saw sort of a ragged picture of chivalry. And things were not perfect, but he was all right and he treated her with respect, and Ghilan’nain, and he had begun to wind things down in the boxing ring, and the gambling was still a problem, but he was very good, so who was she to complain? His magic was growing, and she was proud. His power was like Marin’s, but it was bigger than Marin’s. Amplified, pure. She both humored and nurtured his relationship with Ghilan’nain. He would know sooner or later what to do, and whether he might want it to last, and this self-sufficiency of the spirit was something she knew he would always possess. Razor sharp instincts. He still followed them wherever they lead.

He was going to be a good man.

A few months before this, it had been his birthday, and she’d taken it upon herself to shine him up an old piece of bone she’d found buried somewhere toward the back of their property. She found bones and antlers out there all the time, but this one had teeth. It was a piece of a wolf, a wolf’s mandible, and the coincidence struck her as meaningful.

Solas never bragged about his reputation, not to her, not to Ghil. He used it only to intimidate his opponents. He’d been known as Fen’Harel since he was seventeen, and the name she thought was quietly accurate, though she would not tell him that. Solas was rebellious and tricky, intimidating in his stature, and very fast and very strong. He was also desperately loyal, and this is the part that most people didn’t associate with his nickname—the Wolf. Wolves were rare mammals in that they mated for life, and they traveled in close packs, fiercely provincial and protective of their own. When she gave him the bone, she told him none of this, only that he should do with it what he would, and remember that his reputation as _the Wolf,_ as _Fen’Harel_ was his to own and to wield. Of course she had no way of knowing what would happen in the coming millennia, and how that name would be twisted beyond truth and comprehension, but just like everything else with Leanathy, she did the best she could with the knowledge and the power she had at any given time.

Solas was thankful for the wolf bone, and whittled out a couple grooves for friction, and then he strung it on a long leather strap. He hung it on his bed post, the bed where both he and Ghilan’nain slept most nights of the week now, but it was what it was. Leanathy wasn’t going to try and stop them. She wanted them here, safe, not in the city, and that is what she got. He had been honest with her when she asked what was happening between them. Another moment in which she acknowledged openly within herself, _My son is good. Whatever comes, my son has a kind and deserving soul._

The next day, after Ghilan’nain rode home on her bike, the skies cleared and the air dried, and there was a sandstorm. They blew through the Weathers every once in a while, usually following the rain and bringing the heat and whipping up the soils of the garden.

She and Solas hunkered down in the kitchen until it passed, listening to the wind chimes whip and whistle. She was suddenly overcome with this feeling of guilt that she could not place.

“What’s the matter?” he said to her, noticing her sudden melancholy. They were playing Diamond Back at the kitchen table, a game that Solas had invented himself.

“I’m not sure,” said Leanathy as the wind whipped outside. “Do you feel guilty, too?”

“A little,” he said.

“The sands of time are blowing,” she said, smiling now, drawing a card from the deck. “You know that when they do—that’s when something really important is about to happen. Make sure you dig your heels in, vhenan. Head homeward.”

Solas smirked. “Is that one of yours or dad’s?”

“Mine,” she said. “Your father never would have made a metaphor about sand. He liked puddles and broken glass and old rotting tree houses that nobody cared about anymore.”

 _The sands here are life-giving_ , thought Leanathy as she played cards with her son during the final night of their simple life together in the Weathers. They are magical rocks and filled with whispers from the salty sea. Way out in the Backwater, farms thrived not eighty yards from the shoreline.

 

_8_

Mythal gathered herself. Like a tiny bundle of blue velvet. She was filled with secrets and she smoothed the hair off her clean and pretty face and became very serious. "You asked before, about how she had died, Lea."

"Yes, I did," said Sene. "I was just curious."

“You asked about her, and you did not even know the significance of your questions.” She folded her hands on the table. Sene could feel her working very hard to ignore that itch beneath her sleeve, and she could tell this was a new layer of her neurosis, that it had not been something she’d had to grapple with before. “Leanathy was a gardener,” continued Mythal. “Do you know what that means? After Marin, and other than Solas, it was the only thing she ever really loved, the one way she spent her time.”

“What does this have to do with anything?” said Sene.

“I watched her plant…pieces,” said Mythal. “Little seeds of her soul—I watched her do it. In the soil, and elsewhere. She is the one who taught me how. She is the reason that I am here. I know you are no mage, Sene, but you are a woman, as well as the daughter of farmers. You must understand what it is that I am telling you. _Seeds._ ”

“You saw her?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think she might be alive?” said Sene.

“I need to find that out,” said Mythal, very cold. “And that is the favor I am here for. I would like you to come with me.”

“You want me to come _with_ you?”

“Yes,” said Mythal, matter of fact. “I need your protection. To do all that I seek, I must go through the Crossroads. If I attempt to traverse them on my own, there are enemies who would have my head on a platter. That cannot happen.”

Sene dropped her face into her hands, rubbing. “Does Solas know?”

“No,” said Mythal. “He is innocent to all but his own speculation. He asked me once, several weeks ago, before he left for Kirkwall whether I thought his mother might have done the same as I have. I gave him no answer.”

“Why?”

“Because I know what I saw, but I do not know for sure what has come to pass.”

Sene stopped to regroup. For once, she understood.

“Leanathy was very powerful,” Mythal continued, "but she was also good. She was only good. If she’d had even a shred of cut throat in her blood, she would have furthered her family’s legacy and ruled our kind with a gentle hand. She _was_ an evanuris. She simply did not care. Instead, she employed her power mostly as a means of self-preservation. And to protect Solas for as long as she could.”

“What do you mean— _self-preservation?_ ”

“Grieving,” said Mythal. “Processing. Moving on.”

“What kind of power did she wield?” said Sene. “Solas mentioned water, once. A long time ago.”

“Her magic lived inside the earth,” said Mythal. “Water came easy, but for her, the world was all one churning circus. Purification, renewal, fertility. Elves were only immortal if they had the power to make it so. Uthenera, cultivation, these were not commonly practiced magics, and they are long dead by now. But with no point of reference to serve as your guide, Sene, I’m afraid that, for now, this is all I can make you understand. Is that okay?”

Sene put her head down on the desk, sort of hard, and it hurt a little, and she regretted it. She rubbed at her forehead with the heel of her palm. She drew quiet. “What would finding her achieve?”

Mythal began to pick anxiously at the end of her sleeve. “I am through striving, Sene,” she said. “Solas’s desires have changed. Despite my occasionally jealous behavior, believe me when I say that I have accepted this, though it has turned parts of my body to ash. I love him still, and I love Lea, and this—this is my only motivation. You are the woman who warms his bed in the mornings. He puts the hair behind your ear, and he makes you butterflies.” She was the one crying now. But she stopped, quickly, much like Sene had, catching herself before it was too late, and she was too deep, because then the tears might never stop. “I died, and Lea died, and whatever becomes of us, now he is yours to protect.” She cleared her throat, lifted her chin. “And if Lea lives, by some chance and stretch of imagination in this world, then she can help me to help him in achieving what he must to protect you in return.”

Sene flattened her hands on the table. Mythal had this way of making everything seem beautiful and important and dramatic, like the theater, like one of Varric’s books. “Fix the Veil,” she said, staring at her left hand, the anchor.

“Yes,” said Mythal.

"Then I will help you," said Sene. "I will have to tell him, all of this, when I see him again. But I will help you."

           

Now, Leanathy was washing a glass cup. She poured water in the cup, swirled it around, and then poured it out of the cup again. She dried it with a soft linen towel, and she set it upside down on the little wooden rack beside the basin. There were other dishes there, too, all of her own invention. Mostly, her glass came out blue or purple these days. Sometimes green. But every once in a while, it was clear. The clear pieces she prized the most, because they were the hardest to achieve. They required full mental clarity and resignation from the troubles of the world. She shined them up each time she used them, made sure there were no smudges, no fingerprints or little marks from her lipstick on the rim. She liked to wear lipstick, most of which she mixed herself into little glass pots the size of an acorn. It helped her to feel whole, as if something mattered enough outside her own perception that she might, one day, actually need to look presentable.

She had one full acre of grain outback, and a small silo. She baked her own bread and even had a small shed for wine making. She wanted to have a vineyard, because it was just always something she’d thought about but never had time to grow before. Grapes are a dreadful nuisance unless you’ve got a lot of extra time and love to give. The vineyard was so small, like a simple square of land behind the garden, but it was neatly kept and organized, and she thought about it most days. Her wine always came out yellow. The grapes were green, and they made yellow wine, which was best served when chilled. She would put the bottles on ice and drink slowly. Too much alcohol could make her see things through a different kind of longing that she did not care to reawaken. But just enough—it could make her giddy in a strange sort of way. There were spirits who lived up the mountain, and they would come by to chat in the evenings when they sensed she was feeling alone. She had never had the time to go out and really build up a fishing hole, but she would some day. She had plans, many plans.

She wiped her hands off on her apron now, and she removed it, and she hung it on a hook by the wood-burning stove. She undid the piece of twine that tied the black hair off her face, and she scrubbed at her scalp a little with her fingers and shook it out hard. She had slept late that morning. She often felt guilty whenever she slept past a certain point, but the nasturtium was forgiving, and so was the garden overall, and her mind in those days, and so she went to the shelf by the front door to get her yellow watering can. She brought it to the kitchen. She filled it with water that ran magically up from the earth and out of a spigot she had installed over the basin. She had built a well underground about three months before, then a drain, and once her magic found its footing, she was able to finally run the water inside, using copper pipes, levers, and enchantment. It was extraordinary, the things she could do now. The kitchen was clean and the curtains were white. She thought of her son, as she so often did in these moments of stillness before heading out to the garden. Where he might be now, and how watching him all those years, it had taught her a thing or two about building, and she thought about how she regretted nothing of their little life before, and how she loved him still. More than he knew.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More stories about Solas as a teenager, his relationship with Ghilan'nain, and his mother can be found [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8623606/chapters/19773958). :-)


	50. The Trespasser

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I feel sad, he thought, and I feel good, and I feel like a boy coming home from school with a handful of dandelions." -Ray Bradbury, _The Golden Apples of the Sun_

You could see all the way to the horizon by now, and it was nothing but sea. Sea for thousands of years, and an endless stretch of bone-white sand, scattered with pale driftwood. The sky was blanched, and all the colors of this place seemed to be in another register. Like the whole world had been faded by the sun. There were big piles of kelp all crawling with mollusks, and every now and again, elfroot growing full tilt in huge, fat bushels, awaiting a harvest that would never come.

The four men were running low on water, and at some point, Solas thought he had seen one of the old bluetails that, when he was a kid, he’d used to watch diving straight for the waves, plucking fish with their long beaks. This was the Backwater by the Sea. There was no question about it now. Most everything was gone, but what remained was exactly the same as it had always been. It was extraordinary, and as much as he wanted to balk at the irony, all he could do was stare.

This was where he and Ghilan’nain had used to come on their bikes for many years as children and teenagers, the sun like a golden apple, all the ladies of Arlathan wearing their hats in the shapes of birds. He would braid her yellow hair, and she would make a face, and then she would make a little crab from a lemon or a lime, and she would blush all the way down to her sunburned shoulders, and sometime after they were both eighteen or so and decidedly more than friends, he would take her by the hand and make love to her in the cool, hidden canyons. Beauty, truth, noise. The little old toothless ladies who lived in the farm shacks up on the cliffs above would rattle out after them, shaking their canes. _No smoking out here, village kids!_ they would shout, and Solas and Ghil would laugh and ride away, go to Arlathan, go to his house. In the Backwater, they were considered big-time city slickers because they had come from the suburbs and they wore shoes. It was funny, how they lived like kings here. Sometimes they would sneak into the golf course and watch rich people get married. Ghil’s mother had been a wedding planner, and Ghil was filled with emotion as a girl, but she would never show it, not anywhere but weddings. At weddings she would cry, and Solas would put his arm around her and find the whole thing to be so endearing, in the way of a kitten or other small animal. Something to be protected. He could have put her in his pocket and walked around with her there, safe as houses, forever.

Solas had never allowed himself to miss Ghilan’nain. Not once in the past 9,000 years had he thought of her like this. That was too many loopholes for even his elegant mind to create. But this was a place they had shared, and here he was, standing at the edge of the sand with his boots getting wet, and she was gone—the girl he’d known back then was gone, and she had been gone for a long, long time, and he missed her, how she’d used to be. How he’d used to be. When they were idiots. When the waves were enough.

Solas came back into reality at some point. He was soaked to the ankle with salt water, looking around. The other men were up ahead, turning south, leaving the sea. He called out. They waited. Once he caught up, Bull asked him, innocently, if he was having some sort of flashbacks. Solas said, _Yes, in a way._ Dorian passed him the canteen, almost empty. Solas took a small sip, passed it to Thom, who followed suit. _I’m sorry for the delay,_ he said. _Let’s keep moving._

 

The Viddasala’s physical trail had mostly been eradicated by the storm. They had been tracking her imprint on the Veil for no less than ten miles. It felt like forty. Solas had no idea how she could have come so far in such strange, psychotic weather, though Bull promised that the Qunari constitution was not the same as elves or humans. It was a bit more robust in ways, like being covered in a thick hide, and these things stood to protect them from the elements. They were heading inland now as the sun hit the apex, following the trail, and to try and find a source of fresh water. After a couple more miles, the terrain began to change. Cotton plants and their magnificent yellow flowers grew waist-high where the sand filtered into the dark soil, everything covered in a thin and crunchy layer of icy snow that was beginning to melt in the sun. There were green vines plumping through, a bit of wheat flattened beneath their boots, tall red grasses that grew in bursts, and very few trees. The air was cold here, crisp, but the sun was warm, and it was comfortable, and the men had all taken off their jackets by now as if giving up on the day, like they were on no particular mission at all other than to simply enjoy the weather.

Their boots crunched in the snow. They gathered some of it into their canteens, as it was very clean and otherwise untouched.

“How many Orlesian noble families do you wager Josephine could name in a single, carefree recitation, Thom?” said Dorian for no particular reason. He was using his staff as a walking stick.

Thom just laughed. “All of them, Tevinter. Every single one.”

“Women have brains for that sort of thing,” said Bull, his axe resting on his shoulder. “They remember everything. Sometimes, it twists in their minds, to the way they wish it would have happened, but they don’t forget.”

“And I suppose you have never once twisted a memory in your mind, Bull, to the way you wish it would have happened? Am I right?” said Dorian.

Bull grumbled. “I only remember the really important stuff.”

“Well, that is just not true. Not when it comes to me.”

“When did you go soft on me, kadan? I’m typically the one who has to pry the feelings out of your armored ass with a crowbar.”

Solas and Thom exchanged glances, smiled down at their boots.

“Since we keep almost dying,” said Dorian. “In any case, there is something about this place that makes me feel like being honest.”

“Then be honest with me,” said Bull. “Are we ever gonna find this bitch, or are we going to be stranded in Solas’s childhood forever?”

“Excuse me?” said Solas.

“No offense, boss,” said Bull. “I’d just like to go home. At some point.”

“As would I,” said Solas. “And please, do not call me boss.”

“How long has it been now?” said Bull.

“How long has what been?”

“Since you last saw Sene. And I mean in the flesh. None of this dancing in dreams shit.”

Solas cleared his throat. “Nearly six weeks.”

“That’s a long fucking time to be a away from your woman,” said Bull.

Solas squinted up at the white blue sky. Then he looked straight ahead. There was something up there, something dark. He just couldn’t make it out yet on the horizon. "I am aware of that.”

“The trail is getting thin,” said Dorian. “Can you feel it, Solas?”

“Yes,” said Solas. “The Veil here, in general, is thin. Like breathing energy.”

“I might double back,” said Dorian, wiping the sweat from the brow with the back of his hand. “See if we missed something.”

“Not alone,” said Solas. “We all go.”

So they all went. All four of them, dragging back to the last place where the trail didn’t feel so thin, about half a mile, in silence. Once they got there, however, it had become even thinner, like netting coming apart thread by thread, and so they doubled back once more, to where Dorian had made his initial suggestion. It was exhausting. Nothing had changed, just the general feeling that the world was slipping into oblivion, as the Veil produced its desperate humming in Solas’s ears, and it was a kind of pain, he knew. It was missing parts and pieces, its foundation rattled by the Breach and he had not yet taken the time to really consider how the fuck he was going to repair it.

“We’re losing it,” called out Dorian, kneeling back somewhere behind them, his palm to the earth.

“No we’re not,” said Solas, shutting his eyes. “It’s just quiet. Give me a minute.”

A minute went by. Nothing changed. The men had wandered. Bull was kicking the snow with his boots.

“Hey Solas,” he said, out of nowhere.

“Yes, Bull.”

“So is this really Arlathan?”

“No,” said Solas, opening his eyes, leaning on his staff. “Where we were, with the Viddasala at first, before the final mirror, that was Arlathan. Where we are now is many miles outside of Arlathan.”

“Do you see that up there?”

“Up where?” said Solas.

“Way the fuck up there. There’s something up there. I can’t tell what it is, but there’s something.”

“Oh,” said Solas. “Yes, I saw that quite a while ago.”

“What is that?”

“I’m not sure.”

Together, they stared, due south, for what felt like many minutes. What they were seeing, it was just a mass. A shadow. Nothing more.

“I think Dorian wants to bring me home to his parents,” Bull grunted after a while, shifting his weight in the snow.

“That’s good,” said Solas, glancing at him. “Is it not?”

“I don’t know,” said Bull. “Sometimes, I wonder if we’re not better off, you know? You and me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Looking at Sene and Dorian, dealing with all this bullshit from their families. Sometimes I get to thinking—is it worth it?”

Solas stared off at that shapeless, black mass in the distance. “It must be,” said Solas, “otherwise they would not want to bring us back at all.”

“Ah, maybe you're right,” said Bull. “I’m being temperamental.”

“Then again,” said Solas, “Sene’s family merely meddles in her sense of personal freedom and affairs. They’re annoying in the way any family who fails at basic communication is annoying. Dorian’s family, however, tried to change who he was, fundamentally, using blood magic.”

“That was just his father,” said Bull.

“Either way,” said Solas, “I’d say his and yours is a far more complicated situation, Bull.”

“You’re right about that much,” said Bull, scratching at his jaw. “But let’s not forget about the part where you’re the Dread Wolf, Solas. The elven fucking bogeyman, or whatever. Ever thought about how you’re going to break that one to Sene’s dysfunctional Dalish clan?”

Solas smiled. He stowed his staff on his back and placed his hands in his pockets. “You’ve got me there,” he said.

“I just get…worried,” said Bull. “Ah, fuck it.” He wrung his hands a little bit, shook his head.

“What about?” said Solas.

“That Dorian’s gonna bail,” he said. “He’s buttoned up real fucking tight sometimes, you know? And it’s a lot to deal with, this—me and who I am and who he is and where he comes from. Neither one of us has any real experience with this kind of thing.”

Solas sighed. “I do,” he said.

“Yeah?” said Bull.

“My mother was cut off from her noble family when she married my father,” said Solas, “and Mythal and I lived in secret for many years. I know what it means, dealing with difficult, if not impossible circumstances when it comes to being with the person you love. I do not envy you, but I do know that the two of you will figure it out.”

Bull nodded at this, clapped his hand to Solas’s shoulder. “You always know exactly what to say, Solas.”

Solas smirked. “It is both a curse and a blessing, I promise.”

The tall men stood very tall, staring up at the horizon. Bull exhaled, huge and tired, but then he straightened up, his senses heightened. He took his hand off Solas’s shoulder.

Like a quickening.

“What’s wrong?” said Solas.

“Where the fuck is Rainier?” said Bull.

Solas looked around. His heart stopped. He found Dorian first, still out of earshot, sitting cross-legged on the earth in meditation with the sun. But there was no Thom.

“Shit,” said Bull, drawing his axe.

“Wait,” said Solas. He sensed something, up on a small hill, about 50 yards to the immediate east. Two figures, standing. He snapped his fingers, pointed. He did not risk shouting out for Dorian. It was Thom, with a knife to his throat, and the Viddasala. She was here now, and she had him. The picture was so backwards, Solas didn’t know what to do. Thom, of course, looked more angry than afraid. When he caught Solas’s eye, he waved—almost silly. The Viddasala was bigger than he was, still, and she had a good grip on him, and her knife was very long.

“I thought Dorian said we lost the trail,” said Bull through clenched teeth.

“Apparently its thinning meant simply that we had reached its end.”

“Shouldn’t trails get more obvious when they’re more recent?”

“The Veil is unpredictable,” said Solas.

He tossed his staff to the crunchy, half-melting snow. He put up his hands and started up the hill. Bull followed, but he did not discard his weapon.

“You throw down your staff, mage,” said the Viddasala.

“Yes. You win,” shouted Solas. “Now let him go.”

“I win?” she said. She renewed her grip, hastily. She had a crown of blood dried around her head as if she’d taken a bad hit, maybe run into something sharp during the storm. The wind whistled passed the reeds.

“Fucking shit, get on with it,” said Thom now. “Either kill me, or let me go.”

“Stop talking,” she said.

“What happened to your head?” said Solas to the Viddasala.

She said nothing.

“Did it happen during the storm?” he said. “Let him go, and we can help you.”

Her lips were dry and cracked. “This place is haunted,” she said.

It was a dark thing to say. Solas looked at Bull.

“She’s fucking crazy,” said Bull. “Don’t listen to her.”

Solas nodded. “What do you mean it’s haunted?” he said to the Viddasala.

“I met with a spirit in the valley to the south,” she said, “before a huge palace made of trees. I attacked on instinct. It hit me with a rock.”

“A palace made of trees?”

“A witch’s lair,” she said. She stared right at him, entirely earnest, like she had figured something out during her pilgrimage through these ancient fields. “Who are you?” she said, finally.

“Excuse me?” said Solas.

“Tall elven mage who advises the Inquisitor and her magical hand. Who swindles his way into her bed. Who controls the mirrors and now her throne and leads his enemies as well as his brethren to a place where witches lie. Who are you?”

Thom was red in the face. He struggled occasionally on instinct.

“That is what this looks like to you?” said Solas. “You think that I have purposely swindled my way into this position of power by _sleeping_ with the Inquisitor?”

“That is exactly how it looks,” she said, voice shaking. “To your love, Inquisitor. You broke us through that final mirror. It was supposed to be unbreakable. You have too much power.”

“Your perceptions are understandable,” said Solas. “But they are incorrect. Now please, release him.”

She ignored him. Bull had been right. She was crazy, unhinged. Whatever she’d seen, it had changed her, gotten inside her head. She said, “Whoever you are, Solas, you must be dealt a blow. You have too much control within the Inquisition. Your actual Inquisitor, elven archer from a non-magical Dalish clan, I understand her. I once tried to forge an alliance _with her._ But she was poisoned.” She looked at Bull now. “She was poisoned, and so are you, Hissrad.”

“Nobody here is poisoned but you, Viddasala,” said Bull.

“Do you know with whom you walk on this day?” she said. “Who this man is who leads you on your quest?”

“I know exactly who he is,” said Bull. “Probably better than he knows himself.”

“Of course you do,” said the Viddasala. “Because you walk with mages now, absorbing their dark instincts. Tell me, where is your Tevinter lover, traitor?”

Bull looked around. He did not see Dorian anywhere.

“Why?” he said.

“Because, even still, I would like to ask him what it feels like.”

“What what feels like.”

“To be fucked by the Qun.”

That is when Bull picked the axe up off his shoulder. Solas felt, for just a flicker, helplessness. It was terrifying. But then there was a stirring. Several birds leapt from the brush and took off—little things of gold and iris, like toads with wings. The Viddasala was hit with something, choking, losing her breath, and she dropped the knife. She released Thom and fell to her knees.

It was Dorian. He had put the blade of his staff deep through the meat of her back and yanked it out, quickly. Thom stumbled forward. Dorian stood above the Viddasala, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and spat. “It feels quite good,” he said. “Thank you for asking.”

“Kadan,” said Bull. The tension broke. He went to Dorian. He shook his head. He dropped the axe and held Dorian’s face with both hands. He was earnestly worried, taken aback. “Are you okay?”

“Yes, amatus,” said Dorian. He tossed the staff and dusted off his hands. He held onto Bull’s wrists and closed his eyes as they touched their foreheads together. “I am just fine.”

At some point, Solas had completely lost his breath. He got to Thom, helped him to his feet. Thom scrubbed at the raw spot on his neck where the Viddasala had almost cut the life out of him. “Fuck me,” he said. “I got tripped up. She came out of nowhere.”

“You’re all right,” said Solas. “You’re all right. And it is over.”

Thom shook out his head. “It was weird. I think she’d gone nuts,” he said,. “Kept mumbling about something she’d seen—a valley. That’s what she called it, _where the spirits hold guard_. Up that way, in the distance. Sounded fucked up if you ask me.”

“We’ll investigate,” said Solas. But that was all he said.

They took a rest after that, all of them. Solas plopped down into the weeds and drank cold melted snow straight from the canteen. He fell onto his back with his hands folded behind his head and stared at the sky. Thom sat down beside him while Bull and Dorian were nearby, talking each other through something. It seemed rather domestic. Thom hung his own head between his knees, picking apart a purple flower as he caught his bearings. The world was sweet, the clouds coming in to dull the sun in the early evening. After a little while, one of the petals from the flower Thom had been shredding caught in the breeze and dusted across Solas’s forehead. He reached for it, studied it between his fingers.

It was time to go. He stood up, dusted off his furs. The men gathered after the Viddasala was wrapped delicately in a linen tarp. Her madness had been unnatural in the end. It was a sorry state to die in, thought Solas, for anyone. They discussed the possibilities.

“To the south,” said Bull. “That’s what she said, right? Can’t be far. And while I can’t say I’m too eager to fight demons right now, I’m also pretty fucking curious.”

“She didn’t say demons,” said Dorian. “She said spirits. Spirits are different.”

“She also said _witch,_ ” said Bull.

“Is it like in Crestwood?” said Thom, unsure of himself, rubbing a dirty thumb to the center of his massive palm. “You said that—You said the Veil is thinner there, too. Isn’t that what you said, Solas? That place was crawling with spirits.”

“It is exactly like that, Thom,” said Solas. “Yes.”

“What on earth would anybody be doing _here_?” said Dorian. “Witch or not.” He was looking right at Solas now. “What do you think, Solas?”

But Solas was lost in his memory again. _Flashbacks._ Once, while living in Mythal’s Blue Fortress, his mother had said to him, _Never get lost in what could have been, Solas._ He had a habit with this. In this way, he sort of wished he could be more like Sene. Sene did not look back, no matter what. Little flickers of her wrist bones in the back of his mind suddenly manifested into the concrete wish that she were there, with him. He wanted to have sex with her in the haunted valley of the spirits. Watch her walk, undressed, to the pool at its center. Fill a pitcher with cool water, bring it back for the two of them. Her hair untamed. She would have told him to go forward that day. She would have made it into a little thing. We can’t _not,_ she’d have said. She made everything feel like a little thing to Solas.

So they hid the Viddasala on a bed of leaves beneath an ancient tree, her body preserved and safe-guarded from wildlife with magic, marked with an invisible anchor so that they could find it, easily, when they returned. They then walked several more miles into the abyss, due south. They did not know when they would be back here again, and they had already come so far from the mirror—it did not make sense to turn back. By now, Varric and Hawke and Fenris must have already gotten back to Skyhold, hopefully with very littler interference. When they’d woke up that morning to start their hunt, the three of them were already gone, back to the mirror, and they’d have already brought the report to Sene who would not be happy, and so as they walked he sort of half-closed his eyes and reached lightly into the Fade to see if he could find her there. Tell her that he was okay, that all was well and taken care of in her name, but of course, she was nowhere. Or, she was somewhere, and she was not asleep, and maybe if they had been closer together, he could sort of tug on her consciousness a little, like a faint signal, but it was mountains and cities and whole seas between them now.

At some point, the men slowed down considerably, as the air got thick with moisture. They entered some humid valley at the foot of a high, glacial hill formation—you couldn’t see to the top, and the hills went on in both directions as far as the eye could see. They knew right away this must have been what the Viddasala had seen. The valley was dark and rich, thick-canopied, the grass green, everything spongy and wet. Huge, warm-weather puddles that seemed without a source, as if they’d soaked right up from the center of the earth. They met with no spirits there, just rabbits and birds and a small family of deer, and all seemed to be in order. Yet, it made no sense, the spontaneous tree cover, the sopping forest in a humid valley. This, the climate here, the weather and the greenery, was irregular. The men looked around, trying to find a clue—though they had no idea what they were looking for. There was a small, deep well at the center of the valley that went down so deep, it took a tossed pebble more than a minute to find water. They could barely make out the splash. There was a bucket, too, and a rope, and the strange feeling that whatever it was down there, percolating in the bottom of that well, it was no ordinary water and drinking it would have caused either sudden death or immortality, and none of them was too eager to find out the truth.

In fact, the euphoria of this place was so strong and so disorienting that Dorian asked Solas if it was possible that they had somehow slipped over into the Fade.

“You mean physically?” said Solas.

“Yes,” said Dorian. “Obviously, it would not be unfounded.”

“But Adamant was a massive event,” said Solas. “We went through a rift in the Veil that Sene opened while under duress, using the anchor. I’m not even sure _she_ could duplicate it if she tried.”

“But the Veil is so…irregular here,” said Dorian. “And you—you have a special relationship to the Veil, Solas. It knows you, bends to you in ways that are entirely unique. Couldn’t it be possible?”

“You mean, couldn’t it be possible that we have somehow just…hummed through to the other side?”

Dorian shrugged. “More or less.”

“It is an odd place,” said Thom, “this valley. Feels like home.”

“Yeah, but the Fade—that was a shit show,” said Bull. “That was fucking scary. This is like a dream.”

“The Fade is massive, like anything else,” said Solas. “It has many zones and territories, and it grows all the time. I do not think that we are in the Fade, but we’re…close. That probably does not make sense to you, Dorian. But there are places in between our world and the Fade. They were mathematically necessary. It’s just that usually, you need one of my mirrors to get there.”

“Well maybe there used to be a mirror,” said Dorian, “and it’s just like, somebody ripped the door of its hinges.”

“Like an open doorway?” said Thom.

“Yes, exactly.”

“Bloody hell.”

Solas hung his head. “Perhaps. But the power that it would take to do something like that—that is not something that I can comprehend, at least not anymore.”

“But it _is_ possible,” said Dorian.

Solas looked around at the inner sanctum of this dark and wet and magical place. He knew that it was. He nodded, once. “Yes. Theoretically, yes.”

So they started up the hill. They were looking for the witch, of course. It was not serious climbing, but it did take some effort, and their water had run out sometime right after the Viddasala. The men were dizzy, and they’d lost track of whether it was merely dehydration or some ill effect of that haunted valley.

But the moment they crested the hill, the trees dispersed, and the terrain and the climate and the air were all normal again. It felt just like the Weathers as Solas knew it—flat and grain and sand daisies forever, and it was sub-winter, so you could see it in the greenery, a lack of color, with everything blanched like it had been back on the sea, but there was something else, too, their final destination in the meadow ahead, which was built up into the branches of several huge trees—the structure of a massive treehouse. Just like the Viddasala had described. A near palace before them. When they saw it, they opened their eyes wide as if children.

There were three stories to this treehouse, everything raw and built of wood and two spires at staggering heights, and the foundation was lifted high up in the branches and had several rope ladders hanging down. There was an elaborate staircase that rounded out romantically to the grassy earth, and the grasses were bustling with orange winter flowers and sand daisies, and there was a small shed off to the side with well-used tools like brooms and shovels and rakes leaning. The place was huge and extraordinary with many hidden spaces and little nooks and crannies beneath the house itself.

“The witch’s lair,” said Bull, pretending to sound mysterious. “Nice.”

“So where’s the witch?” said Dorian.

“Hopefully not out picking poppies,” said Thom.

“I want to take a look around,” said Solas, quickly. "Alone." He was drawn by the touch of things, the feel from the valley below.

"Don't get too far," said Dorian. "Remember what happens when men wander." He gave Thom a look.

"Oh, come off of it, Tevinter," said Thom. "My bloody savior. I owe you one in the field. Let's just leave it at that."

"No bargain, my friend," said Dorian. "I was only kidding."

 

It was animal, what Solas experienced that day, a feeling he could barely register as anything more than his gut playing tricks on him. Part of it was thirst, but another part was memory. He dug around in his pocket for a toothpick or a hairpin and he came up with one of each. He opted for the pin, set it between his teeth and went off to the left while the men went right. Whatever this place was, it did not feel dangerous or like a place one might associate with a witch. Whenever Solas thought of the word witch, he thought of Flemeth and her sort of rough majesty, and how a human woman came to live that long, he’d never know. It wasn’t Mythal keeping her alive. In fact, given all he knew now it was probably closer to the other way around, and he wanted to understand what this was about them, the women he knew, mastering their own mortality, and outside of Uthenera, which he knew was a dead magic now, he could hardly understand. He saw the world as it was, as he’d built it. He could make out its angles, where the geometry of the old world met the geometry of this one, but he could not _build life._ Life had merely soldiered on as it was meant to do. But what Mythal had done—that was something else, and it was making him think about the well in the valley and what was down there, and who lived _here,_ and why he knew he was supposed to be a trespasser in this place, but he suddenly felt that he had come home.

There was a cobblestone path that Solas followed, around the yard and beyond the shed. Little magical orbs hovered close to the ground like fireflies, incandescence of all colors. He found a flower garden surrounded by a white picket fence—all growing with red ilex and a familiar orange nasturtium and huge chrysanthemums and dahlias that grew bigger than dinner plates. There were butterflies, too, which was unusual for winter. He went to an old wooden shelf built inside the low fence, and he picked up one of the watering cans. It was tin or something, painted yellow. He had to catch himself against the fence.

“Can this possibly be real?” he said to himself. Out loud. All the world was his thirst and confusion. He thought maybe his brain was doing that thing again, like after the dragon in the Emprise du Lion when he would just black out and wake up in the Fade till Sene had to shake him awake. So he put down the watering can, and he unlatched a small hunting knife from a strap on his belt, and he pressed the blade to the base of his palm. It drew blood. It hurt like fuck. He shook it out and sucked the wound, and he looked around again. “Mother?” he said. But there was no one, no answer. Just a lot of blue butterflies and the orange nasturtium and the bees and for a moment, he thought he was nineteen years old, and maybe he was. What difference would it have made?

_“The sands of time are blowing,” she said, smiling now, drawing a card from the deck. “You know that when they do—that’s when something really important is about to happen. Make sure you dig your heels in, vhenan. Head homeward.”_

_Solas smirked. “Is that one of yours or dad’s?”_

_“Mine,” she said. “Your father never would have made a metaphor about sand. He liked puddles and broken glass and old rotting treehouses that nobody cared about anymore.”_

Meanwhile, Dorian, Bull, and Thom had wandered into the under-guts of the treehouse. Everybody felt safe here. There was no alone, no fear. Dorian found a set of wind chimes that seemed to sing beautiful music, despite the lack of wind in this dark, happy underneath place. He tinkered with them—half-bone, half-metal. Thom found a tree that grew straight out of the earth in the shape of a man, vines growing for his hair, and he got his foot stuck in some bramble, which seemed to rattle him at first but only served to make him laugh in the long run. Bull found a piano that had never been played, and it seemed to be growing straight out of the earth and covered in bluish vines and dahlias, and he opened up the top to look inside where he found it to be rusted and out of tune. A bard once, somewhere in the Free Marches, maybe Starkhaven, had taught him a few notes on the piano and ever since he had hoped to take it up again. His hands were big, and he would need a special brand of keys, but he thought probably his payout from the Inquisition might be enough to provide him with a great big piano. Something he could play in the evenings while Dorian went about his reading. It was a romantic notion that he was glad to entertain.

He was drawn back out front to the yard. He wandered until he found the setting sun, and it licked his face and made him feel irrevocably sane, as even as he had felt in months, as if he were on the right track, finally. Nobody he loved dead or dying, not as far as he knew. He had worried over that thing that the Viddasala had said back on the ledge before the mirror— _You’ve burnt every bridge you ever built, Hissrad—_ and how it had bit him at first, but that was an old anxiety, and he knew it now, and it had been solved by Dorian and Solas, Sene and Thom, Sera, and all the other friends he’d made here. Even Krem he had come to appreciate in some new light, as more than a second-in-command and probably something like an actual buddy. He looked forward to getting back to Skyhold, seeing that old place again, but for the time, he was in no hurry. He wanted to sit and take communion with the treehouse.

He stood out front in the big meadow yard and surveyed its sheer size and capacity. It was massive and beautiful, a majestic creature and weird, and from it, he thought he could hear a distinct humming, like it was breathing, like the whole thing was alive, and not just because it was trees, but because it was somehow sentient.

That is when he turned around and he saw a woman. He’d thought she was a spirit at first, and so he braced himself, but this was no spirit. She was an elf, standing there, very still, very small, her head tilted low so that he could barely make out her eyes. Her black hair blew to the side, getting in her face, but she did not move to adjust it. She wore a simple cotton housedress, the color of sky, and a clean, white apron. Her hands were in loose fists by her sides. Something about her—it was hostile and possessive, in the way of a mother he never knew. In the way of a witch.

Bull did not move. He looked around. He was alone.

“Hi,” he said to the woman nervously. He held out his hands in surrender. “Are you, uh…is this your house?”

She looked up. She put the hair behind her ear, slowly. Her eyes were a pale, silver gray. She lifted her chin, raised her eyebrows, interested, but she did not speak. She was a beautiful woman, but older. Not old, just old _er._ Like Mythal.

Bull looked over his shoulder. “Hey, Dorian,” he called out, gently.

“Yes, dear,” said Dorian from somewhere underneath the house.

“Can you go find Solas?”

With this, the woman seemed to jolt. “Who are you?” she said.

Bull looked back. “Hey,” he said. “Easy.”

She seemed confused. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m Bull,” he said, walking toward her, slowly. “I’m, uh, me and my buddies here, we’re with the…Inquisition, but you probably haven’t heard of us.”

“The Inquisition?” said the woman. “That sounds dire.”

“It was,” said Bull. “It really was, for a while there. I just—look, lady. We’re just here because we heard some weird stuff about this place. We’re the good guys. I promise. We just wanted to check it out. That’s all. We’re not here to hurt you.”

“I know that,” she said.

Bull took a very deep breath. “Oh,” he said. “Well, okay then.”

“You mentioned Solas,” she said. She squinted at him in a familiar way that made his bones crawl. “Why?”

“He’s our boss,” said Bull.

“Your boss?”

“Well, technically, his girlfriend is our boss, but she had to go do some things back home, so she left him in charge for a while.”

“Girlfriend?”

“Uh, yes.”

“What is her name.”

“Sene?”

“Sene,” said the woman, like she was tasting the word. “And when you talk about Solas, you do mean an elven man, don’t you? Big, tall. Very bald.”

“Yes,” said Bull, scratching at one of his horns. “That’s exactly right. Hey, I—what the fuck. Do you know him?”

The corners of her mouth—they sort of flickered. “He’s my son.”

Dorian came out then, slowly. He stood at Bull’s side as he took off his gloves. “Thom went to find him,” he whispered. “I don’t know where he went.” Then, he looked at the woman, blinked. “Andraste’s tits. Is this our witch?”

But Bull said nothing, was just staring at the woman with his mouth open. Dorian waved a hand in front of his face, snapped his fingers. “Hello?” he said. “Bull?”

“Holy shit.”

 

Meanwhile, Solas was having trouble breathing in the garden. Thom found him, keeled over against the fence.

“I apologize,” said Solas. Thom had his hand on his back, lightly. “I just—I can’t seem to catch my breath.”

“You look like you’re having some sort of panic attack,” said Thom. “Look at me.”

“Panic attack?” said Solas. “I don’t know what that is.”

“Yeah, well, you wouldn’t," said Thom. "Feels like your chest is caving in? Hard to breath? I used to get them, early on. When I first joined the Inquisition. Lying straight to Sene’s face for half a year, it gave me nightmares. I used to dream about men coming for me, in suits. I'd wake up in a sweat. It’ll pass.”

Solas squeezed his eyes shut. He tried not to think about his lungs.

“Have you found anything?” he said eventually, getting a little dizzy.

“Bull was looking for you,” said Thom. “I’m not sure. Take your time.”

Solas glanced around, then he seemed to catch his breath, finally, and looked down at his bloody hand. He wiped the sweat from his brow on his sleeve.

“Did you do that to yourself?” said Thom.

"Yes," said Solas.

Thom reached casually into the small leather pack on his belt. He handed Solas a folded-up clean linen bandage.

"Thanks." Solas shook out his hand once more. His mouth was very dry. He began to unravel the bandage. Thom watched but did not offer to help.

"Thom," said Solas a little while later, tightening the bandage to his wrist.

"Yes."

"Do you ever think about that morning, in Val Royeaux."

Thom scratched at his beard then, dropped to a crouch. He picked another of the purple flowers he'd found out in the field after the Viddasala. He stood back up, twirled it in his big fingers, studied its tiny brilliance. "Yes, I do," he said.

He had never seen a flower like this before, and at another time in his life, this might have scared him.

 

_“You’re a young man, Solas,” said Blackwall, focused on the grit beneath his fingernails. “Have you thought at all about your life with her—with Sene—after all this is over?”_

_“No,” said Solas. “Not rationally.”_

_“Do you consider yourself a man of faith?”_

_“What do you mean?”_

_“I mean, when you make choices, do you follow your gut, your bleeding heart, or do you rely on your intellect? Your…rationality? I ask, because you seem like a carefully measured man.”_

_“I am. Most of the time.”_

_“A man in love is never measured.”_

_“I have noticed. Believe me.”_

_“Tell me, Solas,” said Blackwall. “And if you truly want my advice, you’ll give me the truth. What is it about the Inquisitor that makes you love her so? And I don’t want platitudes. I don’t care that she’s beautiful, or that she’s a woman of many talents. I don’t care about her grace.”_

_Solas shifted, leaned forward off the bars. He rested his elbows on his knees to look at him. “She’s just—" He broke down then. "She makes it okay for me to be weak,” he said. “I have not had that—I have never allowed myself to have that. She does not hold back her love, and when she gives it to me, she just gives. So freely? As if her love is endless. And as if I, alone, deserve it. All of it, all of the time.” He realized then that he was shaking, incredulous. He felt emptied, sore. Like he’d just puked his guts out all over the stone floor, his spine ripped clean through his throat. He clenched his jaw, released, closed his eyes._

_“She makes you feel like a man,” said Blackwall._

_Solas swallowed, his mouth dry. His head hurting. “Yes.”_

_“And there is something inside of you that makes you feel unworthy.”_

_“I want to be worthy.”_

 

They got back to the yard after that. Thom had left his axe in the garden. These things were heavy. Solas was still wrapping and rewrapping the bandage around the cut in his palm when he spat once into the weeds and looked up and saw his men waiting for him. They looked worried.

“What’s going on?” he said.

“I’m not totally sure, boss,” said Bull, a hand on the back of his neck. “But this woman here—I think she knows you."

“What woman?” said Solas. Bull took a step back. Solas seemed merely confused at first, like he hadn't fully heard him, perhaps a little agitated as he approached, but then, he saw the woman in the blue dress and the white apron, and he stopped, cold, in his tracks.

"That woman," said Bull.

"Maker's Balls," said Thom.

Solas said nothing.

"Solas?" said Dorian.

The woman, meanwhile, was so still, staring back at him, like she loved him, in a quiet, waiting worry. She did not reach for him, just waited. "Vhenan," she said, relieved. It was a word she had not spoken in thousands of years.

He searched her with his eyes. “I was just following a lead,” he said. "The lead is you. I thought it was you. In the garden."

“What happened to your hand?” she said.

He looked down, flexed his fingers. “It really was you,” he said. “This, this was stupid."

“What about your face?” said the woman.

He tightened the bandage around his palm one more time. “I took a hit," he said. He looked at her. They stared at each other for a long time. He looked deeply concerned. The sun was getting low. The winter crickets had started their chirping.

"I've been here for a little over two years," she said eventually. "I'm safe, Solas. Everything is fine."

"Two years?" he said.

"Yes."

"You could have told me," he said. "You could have found me in the Fade."

"Why would I do that to you?" she said. Her eyes were soft now. "I was gone. Your life is yours. I thought that perhaps one day you might come here on your own, for some reason, but I put no stock in this. For my own sanity. I knew you were all right, Solas. That is all that mattered."

"How did you know?"

"How any mother knows," she said, untying her apron as if it had begun to stifle her, tossing it to the grass. "I feel. I look down into the gaping jaws of the beast, and I ask him, _How is my son who walks the earth?_ and he says, _He is all right._ And I breathe freely again. I do this every night. That is what I do. But that is my burden."

He did not say anything else. His jaw was set, but he was coming loose around the edges, the two of them together, showing their seams.

“You look thirsty,” she said then, looking around, hurried, to all of them. “You all do.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Thom, nodding once, sort of cracking the tension. “We ran out of water several miles back.”

She smiled, amiable. “You're a good man,” she said.

Thom blushed.

Solas, however, still did not move. Something about him that day—he was very strong, but he seemed battle-weary, hardened but then broken apart and put back together again. He was all right, it was true, but not for lack of trying. So she approached him. She put her small, cold hands on his face, felt him give, lifted his chin in a practiced way, studied his bruised jaw. Solas yielded to her. He was not angry, just doing a lot of math inside his great brain until he could not do it anymore, calculate the odds. It was all true, every word. It was real. So finally, he seemed to just let it all go, like numbers on the wind, and he held onto her wrists and closed his eyes instead. She could feel him taking comfort in this, her solid form. It was enough. It would always be. He took a deep breath, in and out, and then finally, as if making some sort of difficult agreement with his past, he tugged her into him, and he held her there. She held him back something fierce, consumed by his stature, and once they were like that, she was flooded. Joy, sadness, all that burrows in between. As they crumpled together like old habits, she cried her tears, dampening the shoulder of his jacket, and he just breathed.

The other men stood by, looking at their boots, hands behind their backs. The moment was private. The moment didn't last long.

Leanathy parted from her son, who still looked worried, but that was all. He would always be a little worried. It's just who he was. But the moment passed. “Do you men like ice water?” she said. She felt him now, settling, his familiar focus as he studied her. His knuckles lingering at her jaw. She swatted his hand away, gently.

“What the fuck is ice water?” said Bull.

Dorian elbowed him, hard. “Language, amatus.”

“Oh,” said Bull. "Right. Sorry about that."

Solas looked down, smiling. He put his hands in his pockets.

"I think he means to say that we've never had it before," said Thom. "Ma'am. Or, My Lady. Madame—er, Ma'am."

She smiled, dried her cheeks. "Call me Lea," she said and smoothed the hair off her face. It was a magical entity of starlit soil, and it was only her hair. She looked at Solas and tucked her arm into his, a casual gesture. “Now, come inside. All of you. Before it gets dark."


	51. How to Be Loved

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meeting with the goddess.

I.

Down the misty hill, Mythal and Cassandra were filling four canteens with water. The river was green here but also very clear. Mythal carried a greatsword on her back that was almost as tall as she was. They didn’t speak much. Sene and Sera were waiting for them up at the top of the hill. The fog was less here, on the low ground, but the world was still very gray.

Mythal had trekked them through the Crossroads for a day and a night so far. All had gone smoothly. But with the last mirror, they seemed to take a wrong turn, and they found demons. Maybe ten of them, a little parade in an unknown land, chanting their song of death around a rift in the Veil. The fight had been ugly, but Sene managed to get it sealed. They lost the mirror in the mist and pressed on through the trees until they found the river. This was a strange place, filled with miracles and greenery, but all of it hidden by the weather, and very wet.

Cassandra was dirty. She tried scrubbing her armor with a bit of water from the river. She noticed that Mythal had been holding her wrist close to her body since the fight, but she had not said anything.

“Are you all right?” said Cassandra to Mythal.

“Yes,” said Mythal very quickly. She somehow looked even smaller, wearing armor. It was black hide with stormheart for the chest plate and pauldron. Dagna had had to stitch something together from her own personal wardrobe at the last minute. She just lengthened the arms and legs a little. Mythal was a very small woman. Even for an elf.

“Do you not trust me, Mythal?” said Cassandra.

“Do I not trust you?” said Mythal. She looked up. She had dirt on her face, or perhaps it was blood. A pretty woman, even still. She had her shiny brown hair smoothed into a simple ponytail.

“You’ve hardly spoken to anyone since we left Skyhold,” since Cassandra, drying her hands on her leather pack. “Least of all me. You are holding your wrist. I just wanted to make sure you were all right, but I do not believe that you trust me. I cannot help but wonder if it is because I am human? That, perhaps you have not known many humans in your lifetime? If I'm wrong, or sound ridiculous, please just ignore me. I only wanted to ask.”

Mythal was crouching on the bank, looking at her reflection in the river. “Of course I trust you,” she said.

Cassandra sighed. "I am sorry."

“Don't be sorry," said Mythal. "And just so you know, I have observed and lived vicariously through the lives of many human women over the years. I do not draw harsh distinctions between us. Your heart is just like mine.”

“Then what is the matter?”

Mythal ignored the question. “I trust you, Cassandra,” she said again. “Please know this. You are one of the most trustworthy women I have ever known.”

It was emphatic. Cassandra smiled. “Thank you," she said. "I trust you as well, though you must know by now that I don’t fully understand what we are doing here.”

“Yes, I understand,” said Mythal.

“Sene asked me to come along. In any case, at this point in my life, I have seen enough...strangeness to know that very little will surprise me, in the end.”

“You are what, thirty-seven years old?” said Mythal, looking up at her.

Cassandra nodded, slowly, taken by surprise. “Yes, that is right.”

“So am I,” said Mythal.

This seemed to interest Cassandra. She got down to her knees, watched as Mythal ran her delicate fingers through the silt on the riverbank. She lowered her voice. “Were you older than Solas?”

“Yes,” said Mythal. “Seven years. It once pained me, when I first returned and met Sene in person, and I saw how young she was. Not just young either, but new. A new elf, and her heart like a monument to the sun. I have since seen her imperfections. They’ve only emboldened my resolve to help.”

“Help with the Veil, you mean?” said Cassandra.

Mythal nodded. “And other things,” she said. “Solas never got a family. That is what he always wanted, whether he would admit it or not.”

“Did you ever think about it back then?” said Cassandra, hesitant. She was picking apart a reed in her fingers, watching the pieces scatter to the bank. “Having his child?”

“Only in passing,” said Mythal. It was all she said on the matter.

"I apologize," said Cassandra. "It is none of my business."

“Don't worry," said Mythal. "That is the past. We are in the present now.”

“Yes,” said Cassandra, sighing. “The present. When we are is perfectly clear. Though _where_ we are remains a mystery.”

“It is not a mystery," said Mythal. "I know exactly where we are."

Cassandra looked at her. Somewhere now, she thought she heard horses. Nearby, but not close enough to see. “I thought you said you didn't know where we were."

“I never said that,” said Mythal, staring across the river. The fog was so thick here, like smoke, but the world smelled clean. "Did I?"

 

“Hey, Quiz,” said Sera, meanwhile. She was picking something out of her hair. Demon goo, extremely icky. She and Sene were resting on the misty hillside in this unknown land, trying to catch a break.

“Yeah,” said Sene, her knees pulled up, sharpening arrowheads. Mythal and Cassandra were down by the river, gathering water for the rest of the journey. They had not yet decided if they were going to make camp or keep going. Nobody could tell what time it was anyway.

“I know I always meant to ask you this,” said Sera, “but it seemed silly before, when you and Solas were all schmoopy.”

“What is schmoopy?” said Sene.

“It’s like, you know. Always schmooping. New.”

Sene smiled. “Me and Solas haven’t been new for a long time.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“What is it?”

“It’s just—you know, Solas is bald, right?”

“Yes,” said Sene. She nicked herself, winced, brought her thumb to her mouth.

“Well, is he bald everywhere?”

Sene gave her a look. Sera had her knees up now. Wherever they were sitting, it seemed safe enough now. Overhead, everywhere was gray. It was cool and the grass was green. There were horses, somewhere. You could hear them going on with their horse business in the fog.

“What?” said Sera. “I’m wondering, in _earnest._ ”

“I know you’ve seen him with his shirt off,” said Sene. “You know he is not hairless.”

“I don’t get it then,” said Sera.

“Get what?”

“Why just on his head?”        

“I don’t know,” said Sene, shaking out her thumb. The bleeding had stopped. She went back to work. “He was born like that, and so was his father. It’s a bloodline thing.”

“So what color is it?” said Sera.

“What color is what?”

“His, you know, _man forest._ ” She snorted.

Sene gave it a rest with the arrowheads, looked at Sera. “You really want to talk about this? About Solas’s _man forest_?”

“Why not?” said Sera. “Nothing else to do. Not till All-Mother figures out where the flip we are.”

“Okay,” said Sene. “In that case, it’s like, I don’t know, sort of sandy. Not dark or light.”

“Blonde?”

“Not really,” said Sene. “But it’s not like he’s any sort of hairy beast or anything. He’s not Thom.”

Sera laughed at this. “Yeah, Rainy. Great big bushels, that one.” Then, she got kind of quiet, drawing shapes in the grass. “Is it weird?” she said.

“Is what weird?” said Sene.

“With Mythal. You know, knowing. About _them._ ”

Sene sighed sort of huge and looked out at the fog. She dusted her hands together and crossed her legs in front of her. “Sort of,” said Sene. “I just get insecure sometimes.”

“How come?” said Sera. “Just because she’s old?”

"Maybe." Sene shrugged.

“When’s the last time Solas found you in the Fade thing?”

“A while,” said Sene. “I haven’t talked to him since the night before they left. Granted, I’ve been sleeping like shit. I just wish I knew if they were safe.”

“What does your gut tell you?” said Sera.

“What do you mean?”

Sera poked her in the chest. “Here,” she said. “In the heart parts. Are you worried, Quiz?”

“No,” said Sene. “If something were really wrong, I think I would know. I just—” She hung her head. Her red hair was coming free at the temples, the fat braids all loose.

“What’s the matter?”

“When I left for Ansburg, I didn’t think it would turn into a whole thing,” said Sene. She plucked up a handful of grass, tossed it front of her. “I didn’t think it would put us apart for this long. I thought one month, _tops_. I should have known better.”

“You should have known that batshit Qunari elves would blow up a tavern in Kirkwall?”

“I guess not,” said Sene. “But it’s been six weeks, and it’s good to be out, _doing_ things. But I’m tired, Sera. I just miss him.”

They listened to the horses in the distance. Sera sighed and put her arm around Sene. “Me, too,” she said. “Things feel safer with Solas. He always knows what to do.”

Sene put her head on Sera’s shoulder.

“Dagna always knows what to do,” Sera went on. She held Sene’s hand. “You know she’s old, too. Like Solas.”

Sene laughed.

“You get what I mean,” said Sera. “Can’t count the sleeping years. She’s like thirty. So, not old. But old _er._ ”

“She is?”

Sera nodded, counting Sene’s fingers against her own. “Feels like nothing when you’re in it,” she said. “It’s all just hands and antlers in the end.”

“Do you miss Dagna?” said Sene.

“Yes,” said Sera.

The two very tall girl elves sat there in the fog, leaning on each other with their great, long legs spread out in the green grass.

 

A little later, down by the river, the four women met to discuss what they needed to do next. Mythal wore a small leather backpack with a white fur trim. She took it off, and she set it on the ground. Then, she opened it up, revealing Solas's orb. Intact. She touched it with her fingers. The rest of them all crouched down so they could see.

“It’s empty,” said Sene. “We knew that. Solas said it could not be repaired.”

“Repaired, restored. That's not what he meant,” said Mythal. “Dagna put the pieces back together, but like you said, it’s still empty.” Mythal looked at Sene. She then plopped back onto her butt, holding the orb. It was scribbly, tarnished. It was light but big in her hands. It looked ordinary. It looked old. “To put the power back inside, I need to call upon an old friend, Sene, and that is why we are here.”

“That’s why we are _where_?”

Mythal sighed, waved her hand over the river, watched the reflection go past. She looked up at Sene. “The Korcari Wilds.”

"What's that?" said Sera.

Sene stared at Mythal, hard. It was a frustrating revelation but one she should have seen coming. She picked up one of the canteens, took a drink, then she tossed it back to the pile. “It's where Morrigan is from," she said.

"So what?" said Sera.

"So, Flemeth," said Sene.

“I am sorry," said Mythal. "I know you hate her. I thought you would be mad.”

"Be mad?" said Sene. "I left my Commander in charge of the entire Inquisition for an undetermined amount of time. I had to defy him fifty different ways to even get him to give me leave to do this."

Cassandra scoffed. "Cullen. His face when you told him. Priceless."

"I was all in from the outset, Mythal," said Sene.

"I know that," said Mythal.

“So, how much further do we have to travel?”

“No further,” said Mythal. “We’re already here.”

They listened to the horses. There were birds, too, and crickets. They couldn’t tell if it was night or day or something in between. "What do you mean  _we're already here_?"

Mythal stood up then and took a step into the river. Sene followed.

Mythal stopped her. “No.”

“What are you doing?” said Sene.

“Where I’m going, you cannot follow. Not this time.”

“Where are you going?” said Sene.

“I already told you.” Mythal pointed.

They all nearly lost their breath. On the other side of the river now, there was a small hut made of wood. It had materialized out of nowhere. None of them had seen it before. It had a green door and a grass roof and smoke coming out of the clay chimney. Cassandra hastily drew her sword on instinct.

But Mythal held out her hand and told her it was all right. “You don’t have to protect me here,” she said. “This is a safe place, Cassandra.” Mythal picked up the leather backpack and threw it over her shoulder. She took another step, deeper into the river.

“Mythal,” said Sene. “Wait.”

“This will not take long,” she said. “I promise, Sene.”

They looked at each other. The understanding, it was still there, but Sene found herself very suddenly terrified. She nodded, once, but she felt shrouded in a magical wasteland that she did not know how to navigate. All of this—these were not things she understood. She watched Mythal disappear across that river, and she felt Sera’s hand, heavy in her own.

“We’re with you,” said Sera.

Cassandra nodded in agreement. "Until the end."

Together, they stood by the river.

 

II.

Solas stood in the high belfry of Caer Bronach, hands in his pockets, staring out the circle window with the dead carillon way up high overhead. The Fade night out there was blue and dreamy. There were yellow fireflies, and it was a lot of humidity. Summer in Crestwood. You could hear people down there, sounds of happiness, but he couldn’t see anyone. He wasn’t sure why his dreaming had brought him to this place, an old nest of theirs. Out of all the nests they’d made. Perhaps it was because they’d never had the chance to go back—after the dragon. Sene taking her clothes off, showing him how to love her proper. He tried not to think about it too hard.

Inside the tower, the room was exactly as they had left it many months before. The bed was made with rich blue linens. The hearth lit. Veilfire swam in a wide, red bowl. Solas felt on the edge of something. Like he should have been looking out the window, but he got fixated on the glass. His idle mind worried over little things now. Like the Viddasala, like Skyhold, Varric, Kirkwall. He’d not had time to tie all the loose ends. Then it all came back to Sene. But worrying about Sene—that was broad strokes. He hardly saw those anymore. It had been so long since he’d last touched her, he was beginning to feel starved, like a man at sea, or away at the war. And in a way he always had been—at sea, away at the war—it’s just that the women he loved had always been there with him, and he wondered what it must be like to just be a typical man, not a man at sea, not away at the war. Just a man. A man whose life is simple. A man like his father had been. Whether this kind of thing was a choice or not, or even something he could do, Solas didn’t know. He thought about it. He would ask Sene what she thought, the next time he saw her.

Sene. So pretty, letting him win when it came down to it. Making him laugh and cry and come, and he did all those things to her as well. But life was more than its crescendos.

He fussed with his sleeves. He wouldn’t sit. He had hoped to find her this time, in the Fade. He hadn’t seen or spoken with her since the explosion at the tavern, almost a week. He did not appreciate these feelings of detachment. He tried sighing them away, but they wouldn’t go. The day, his work, it was over, at least here, and now he wanted to be with her, even if only for a little while. That is who he was. And this, what he had found here at the very edge of the earth, was the grail of his existence, and the only thing left to do was tell Sene.

He missed her so much he could taste it. He could not recall ever once in his life having wanted to see a woman this badly. But it was clear now that Sene was more than just a woman. Solas had had plenty of those, and she was something else. She was his best friend. She was his partner, his person. They had been thrown together indiscriminately more than a year before, and they’d gone through a great deal, and now, they had come out on the other side as a single unit. He just wanted to talk to her, to tell her that, after all these years, his mother lived. He was proud, and he wanted to share this. He had once been a young man caught in the undertow of his own life decisions. It made him an asshole, but now, he’d reached the surface of his thoughts, his desires. He felt whole. He still got a little fucked up sometimes, a little haunted, but that was something he could deal with as long as he was not alone. He could breathe the air, see the sky.

He shoved his hands back in his pockets, and he turned around to look at the fire. This was disappointment. That’s all. Still, he thought if he stared hard enough, that fire might come alive. So he stayed for a little while, alone, just to manage. Once, the Fade had been a place where he’d come to put his mind back together again. Now, it could still serve that purpose, he just didn’t need it. He had other, better means of reconstruction.

He was not so jaded after all, it seemed.

 

Meanwhile, Dorian, Bull, and Thom were seated at the kitchen table, their hands folded in their laps. Lea had filled a large glass pitcher with water, and several glasses with flowers made of ice and brought everything over on a tray and set it down on the table. They all drank deeply. The kitchen was clean, and Lea had a pale yellow dishrag thrown over her shoulder. The men, against their better judgment, kept trying to find pieces of Solas in her movements and her demeanor. She had a den mother feel about her, like she did not take shit, but she moved with this kind of clumsy elegance, fast, like her motherhood was self-taught, and this made her approachable.

Solas had excused himself almost immediately after coming inside. He said he wanted to try and contact Sene in the Fade. He’d been sort of bashful about it, like he didn’t want to talk, and so Lea did not ask, just directed him to a bedroom up the narrow staircase. The sun was going down. She lit several lanterns, and Dorian helped. At some point, she finally came and sat down with the three men. She had boiled a pot of tea and brought that over, in addition to the ice water. Thom partook in a cup, but Dorian and Bull declined. She stirred Thom a lump of sugar, and though they must have been near on the same age in bodily years, she thwarted his wisdom with her own and seemed to read his mind. She read all of them, and very soon they began to see that this was the part of her that had made it into Solas: the ability to read people so good, to give them exactly what they want. That, and the eyes.

“So,” said Lea eventually. She poured herself a cup of tea, which she proceeded to drink black. “Thom, Dorian, and Bull. You’re Solas’s friends.”

Bull looked up, having gulped his way through another glass of water. She refilled it for him. “That, we are.”

“So you must know Sene pretty well then. It is Sene, right? That is what you said, Bull?”

“Yeah,” said Bull. “Sene. It’s short for something else, but I always forget.”

“Isene,” said Dorian. “But only Solas calls her that.”

“I am not going to pry into you men,” she said, setting down her cup. “I just want to know. Solas has—he seems balanced. I could sense it, right away—we’re all just sitting here. I just want to know.”

“What do you want to know?” said Bull.

“Well,” said Lea, smoothing the hair off her face. “Little things. Like, what does she look like?”

“She’s tall,” said Bull, right away, leaning back in his chair. Dorian seemed to change his mind now and moved to pour himself a cup of tea.

Lea smiled at this. She did it for him. “Tall?” she said, handing him the cup and saucer. “Interesting. How tall?”

“Nearly as tall as I am,” said Thom, cutting in. He had a little scone in his hand now—they were sweet, orange and rose flavored. She’d brought them out with the tea. “Maybe five feet and ten inches. Still a good bit shorter than Solas. Then again, Solas is the biggest elf I’ve ever seen.”

“Solas comes from a long line of big men,” said Lea. “His father was perhaps an inch or so taller than he is.”

“Damn,” said Bull.

“Was it uncommon, even back then?” said Dorian. “For men to be so tall?”

“Yes,” said Lea. “There are some misconceptions in elven folklore, that we were, at some point, bigger people. This just is not true. But like anything else, there are outliers.”

“The Sentinels we’ve met have all been large men,” said Dorian.

“The Sentinels were Mythal’s men,” said Lea. “She liked them big. Hand-picked them that way.” She looked down. “I’m digressing.”

“Your knowledge,” said Dorian, “does it come from the Fade?”

“Yes,” said Lea. But it was clear that she did not want to talk about the Fade. She took a deep breath. “Tell me other stuff.”

“Like what?”

“About Sene. Is she pretty?”

“She’s gorgeous,” said Dorian. “She is very pretty. She has this great big hair.”

“Great big hair?” said Lea.

“Yes,” said Dorian, sipping his tea. “It is so curly, it sort of sticks up all over the place. Difficult to tame. And very red.”

“Hmm,” said Lea. “Okay. She’s tall, and very pretty, and she has big red hair.”

“Exactly.”

“What else?” she said.

“She’s young,” said Bull.

Lea looked at her hands. They were lovely but well used. She wore a small silver ring on her left hand, like a wedding ring. “Yes, I can feel that,” she said. “She’s very loud inside him. Like a drum. And very young. A decade younger than Solas, I’d wager.”

“Andraste’s blessed soul,” said Thom. “How do you know that?”

Lea grinned, sly down at the table.

“She doesn’t seem young,” said Bull. He folded his hands on the table, leaned forward on his elbows. The whole table creaked a little. This made him self-conscious, so he leaned back. Nobody else seemed to notice. “I mean, other than when she’s spiking your cookies with elfroot—she doesn’t seem young. She’s a strong leader, and half the time it’s her digging Solas’s aggressive ass out of trouble, not the other way around. They suit each other.”

“I’m glad,” said Lea. “How long have you all known each other?”

“Just over a year,” said Dorian. “That’s about when the Inquisition came to be. Though it feels like ages.”

“I understand there has been some instability with the Veil,” said Lea, “but that is all I understand of the past two years. The scary details—let’s save them for later. I only want to hear the good things, for now. I’ve had enough shit for several lifetimes.”

“Well, you look incredible,” said Bull, polishing off another glass of ice water, “if that’s any consolation. You and Mythal.”

Dorian elbowed him, hard. Bull gave him a look but then quickly realized his mistake. Lea had merely blushed at first, but she then drew still. So still, the lights in the room seemed to dim and buzz. “What do you mean?” she said.

Bull looked around, to Dorian, then to Thom. He sighed. “Sorry,” he said. “I should’ve let Solas field that one. I think I remember something about you guys being friends—you and Mythal.”

“We were,” said Lea, her eyes very big now, a cold gray, but still somehow soft. “Is Mythal alive?”

“Yes,” said Dorian. “She is alive.”

Lea just stared at him, thinking, her eyebrows going way up high on her forehead. She pushed the black hair out of her face. “I see. And Solas knows, obviously?”

“He knows,” said Dorian.

“Very good,” said Lea. She smoothed her hands over her dress, hunched a little and looked down into her tea, pensive. “Does Sene have magic?”

“No,” said Dorian. “She’s a huntress, an archer.”

Lea looked up. “An archer?”

“She is from a somewhat wealthy Dalish clan of grain farmers, down in the Free Marches. Not a mage among them.”

"She is Dalish,” said Lea. “Does she have the tattoo?”

“Not anymore,” said Bull.

Lea sighed. “If she is not a mage, how does Solas find her in the Fade?”

“They have some sort of thing going on,” said Bull.

“Some sort of thing?”

“Nobody is really sure how it works,” said Dorian. “I have theories. I’m sure Solas does as well. He can find her, and she can find him. But only when she sleeps.”

“I see,” said Lea. She smiled then, sort of toothy, as she fussed with the tablecloth. “That is a good sign, you know. Marin and I used to find each other in dreams. He was always better at it than me.”

“Marin, that was Solas’s father?” said Dorian.

“Yes,” she said, quietly, but proud.

That sat for a moment, reflecting on their deepest memories. At some point, Solas came into the kitchen, looking a little sad. He had his hands in his pockets. He’d taken off his jacket and just wore a simple long-sleeved shirt and brown pants. But the shirt was dirty. The men were all very dirty.

“Everything okay?” said Bull.

“She wasn’t asleep,” said Solas. He sighed. “It’s all right. I’ll try again in a couple of hours.”

“Come sit,” said Dorian. “The three of us were just about to head to bed.”

“We were?” said Bull.

“Yes,” said Dorian. “We were.”

The men got up from the table, all three of them. Lea stayed.

“The second floor has four bedrooms,” she said. “You can take whichever you like. Anything you need, it should be there, waiting.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Thom. “We don’t need much.”

“It’s just Lea.”

Thom nodded, bowed a little out of habit. He was still a proper chevalier, after all these years. The men passed by Solas, each clapping a hand to his shoulder or his back as they went.

Dorian lingered for a moment. “You’ll get in touch with her,” he said.

“I know,” said Solas.

Dorian nodded, and with Bull and Thom, went up the narrow staircase and disappeared.

 

III.

Once inside the grass hut, Mythal closed the door quietly behind her. She removed the greatsword from her back, left it leaning beside the door, and then she looked around. The hut was small and adorned with many flowerpots and hanging plants, up on high wooden shelves. There was a dull shadowbox on a table at the center of the room, a small sofa, and many heavy books stacked up, aimless, on the floor.

Mythal went through the living room and into the kitchen. There, she saw Flemeth.

The witch stood with her back to the door, stirring a pot on the stove. She was casual, dressed like one would dress when making a meal in their own home, wearing green linen slacks, a long winter tunic. Her hair was white and majestic and slicked into a long braid that went all the way down past her waist. The room was warm and smelled very good.

“Hello, Flemeth,” she said.

When she heard Mythal, she did not turn around at first, but she did look up from her work, as if she knew.

Mythal had a seat at the small wooden table in the kitchen. The hut had only one other room off to the back, and that room did not have a door. Inside that room was where Flemeth slept—a simple bed with white covers, a window, and a mirror. Mythal had not been here for a very long time.

She noticed two place settings at the table—two brown clay bowls, two spoons, two empty cups. “Why two bowls?” said Mythal.

Flemeth turned around then, finally. She lowered the heat on the stove with the wave of a hand. “I always set two places,” she said. She had a seat at the table across from Mythal. “You never know, snow child.”

They stared at each other like through the very window of existence. “It's good to see you,” said Mythal. "What is that you're cooking?"

“Chicken soup,” said Flemeth. “I raise the chickens myself. But it won’t be ready for several hours.”

Mythal understood. “That’s too bad.”

“How are you?” said Flemeth.

“Debatable,” said Mythal. “How are you?”

“I am quite the same,” said Flemeth. “Not surprised to see that you walk the earth, of course. You are just as small as I dreamed you, Mythal. I see your seeds finally took root.”

“That they did,” said Mythal. “Though the crop is not terribly robust.”

“And that is why you are here?” said Flemeth.

“Sort of,” said Mythal. “Our bargain is complete, Flemeth. That is why I am here.”

“You are here because of him,” said Flemeth.

“That, too,” said Mythal. “Does any of this come as a shock?”

Flemeth sighed, almost disappointed. “I don’t know if you’ve been watching, snow child,” she said. She folded her hands on the table in front of her. “Both Pride and Sorrow, hopeless in their resolve to hit the world with their fists. Beautiful men who you ruined with violence—are you sure that you can salvage what is left after the storm?”

“They are not ruined,” said Mythal, picking at her sleeves. “No thanks to me, of course. I know that very well. You don’t need to be such a bitch.”

Flemeth smiled. “How is the fire child?”

“Don’t you know? She is here.”

“You told me, several months ago, that Solas was unhappy with the way I treated her in Crestwood. I never meant to anger the girl. I was only there to help, as was decided. Things get boring out here, listening in all the time, imposing only when some hero needs a lift. I know you understand. I obey when you speak, but I also get…carried away.”

“Sene is the most brute helpful woman I’ve ever known,” said Mythal. “Her heart desires so true. It is unrefined in its wants, its needs. This is remarkable. She loves Solas, and he loves her.”

“And you will give them the gift of mortality,” said Flemeth. “So that they may be fruitful and multiply.”

Mythal looked at her hands. She clasped them together. She squeezed her eyes shut. “I have come for the seed,” she said. “That is all.”

“I always assumed you would retake it to restore what was.”

“That is impossible,” said Mythal. “The past is dead. I know that now.”

“Not all that is dead must remain so,” said Flemeth. “Surely you agree.”

“I don’t have time for jokes.”

“And what about your revenge?” said Flemeth.

Mythal stood from the table, very sure of herself. She showed Flemeth her hands. “Do I look like a woman who desires revenge?”

“You look like a woman left to rot in the cold.”

“Maybe so,” said Mythal. “But life is a garden. I’m sick of saying that.”

“Excuse me?”

“I am not a child, Flemeth,” said Mythal. “You have kept my power warm for many years, but I was once an evanuris. Now, I am just a woman, but I see with eyes twice as big as I used to. My heart is in an iron box. I pry it open each night just to take its temperature. Perhaps one day, I’ll get the door off its hinges, expose it to the sun, but for now, this is what I have to offer the world. Everything I did, it was for him, and today is no different.” She picked up the leather pack from the floor. She removed the orb and set it on the table. “My knowledge has served you well over the years, Flemeth. It will always be yours. The power, however, that I need.”

“And will you make it his?”

“Yes.”

“There is only one person who can do that,” said Flemeth. “We both know. The mirror is out back, per your orders, of course. Will you go to it, searching for a ghost in a mother’s shell?”

Mythal sat back down at the table. Somewhere, there seemed to be a clock, making the same ticking noises from her youth. Her father had once had a very beautiful, extensive clock collection. He gave her one for her nineteenth birthday, the day she inherited her family’s estate, and her family’s war. It stopped working in the month before his death. Solas fixed it, of course, replaced the battery. “I am thankful for you,” said Mythal to Flemeth. “Even though you are a mean old witch.”

Flemeth smiled, something warm. The orb was placed, sturdy, on the table between them. “And I, you, elf.”

Mythal thought she’d heard something then, something odd. She looked around. “Are there horses somewhere?”

Flemeth nodded, very wise. “Wild horses,” she said. “They serve as nature’s warning.”

“For what?”

“Demons,” she said. “As you know, the Veil here comes apart easily, like gauze, and they climb through in packs.”

“Yes, we fought several on the way here,” said Mythal.

“They wreak havoc on my chickens.”

“That is very sad.”

Flemeth merely shrugged. “The hazards of living are plentiful in the Korcari Wilds, snow child. Just ask my daughter the next time you see her.”

They stared at each other. The yellow eyes creeped. Mythal blinked several times to put them off her vision. “You wonder after Morrigan,” she said.

Flemeth softened, unwilling. She looked away.

“I can tell you, she is safe,” said Mythal, finding Flemeth’s eyes. “She is with Kieran in a happy place. They will come to no harm. The fire child protects them with her warmth. See?”

The outpouring had been unexpected. She swallowed back her tears. “You are still a kind woman,” said Flemeth. "I don't know how you do it."

“I am trying to remember,” said Mythal. They joined hands. “This will not hurt, but you will sleep for a long time. Do you understand?”

“I do.”

The end was near.

 

IV.

“Care for some tea?” said Lea, once the other men were gone. She was leaning over the back of the chair, resting her chin on her hands and looking at Solas.

He smiled. “No.”

“I’ve got other stuff, too. No coffee. But there is wine.”

“Just water will be fine.” He sat down. He spread out his hands and placed them on the tabletop. Lea got up, came back with a fresh glass, and also a piece of ice wrapped in a linen towel. She handed both to Solas, sat back down. He pressed the towel to his bruised jaw and admired the ice in the glass, how it took the shape of little chamomile flowers in a perfect bunch. He then set it down, filled the glass with water, and he drank. It was the best thing he’d ever tasted in his entire life. “Thank you,” he said.

Lea nodded. She watched him, closely. “How are you?” she said.

“I am good,” said Solas. He looked at her, safe. “How are you?”

“I am good,” she said. She stared at his hands. “You seem good.”

“As do you.”

“Your friends are sweet. Perfect gentlemen.”

“Indeed they are,” said Solas. “Dorian has a lot of power. You and he should have much to discuss.”

“I’m sorry you couldn’t find Sene in the Fade.”

Solas shifted in his chair. “It’s all right,” he said. “It is a craps shoot, finding her there when we’re not together. She is not a mage, so I’m not even sure how it works half the time. I doubt she’s been sleeping very well. Before this, we were all in a great deal of danger, and when we came here—Sene and I had already been apart for a long time. I just wanted to…check in.”

“I grilled Thom and Dorian and Bull a little,” said Lea, fussing with the ring on her finger. “They are loyal to you. I asked only the surfacey things.”

Solas tilted his head to look at her. “Like what?”

“Like what she looks like, things like that.”

“She’s very tall,” said Solas.

She looked at him. He smirked.

“Yes, that is what they said.”

“You will meet her,” said Solas. He adjusted the towel on his jaw, picked up the glass. “Someday.”

“I would like that very much.”

He took another long drink, dried his mouth on his sleeve. “I feel like there is a lot to say, or to ask, perhaps, but I don’t want to talk about any of those things.”

“Me neither,” said Lea. She poured herself another cup of tea. “Solas.”

He looked at her. “Yes.”

She seemed unsure. "Tell me about Mythal."

They stared at each other. Outside, the wind kicked up into the wind chimes. It was so quiet here, like a million crickets and milky sky.

“Your men let slip that she lives,” said Lea. “It was not intended. We were just talking.”

“It’s all right,” he said. “I would have told you.”

Lea stared down into the black pit of her tea. “How is she?”

“She is safe,” said Solas, studying. “She is at Skyhold. That’s where the Inquisition lives. She has no magic. She is not like you. When she first got here, she was…confused. Mentally. But she is getting better.”

“It took me several months to find my faculties,” said Lea. She did not look at him, as if embarrassed. “But my magic was a part of me still.”

“It seems that whatever power she had left, she used it to reconstruct herself. She’s been back for less than two months. Other than her prowess with the sword, she is little more than a civilian, especially at her stature.”

Lea sighed. “Mythal was a powerful evanuris,” she said, “but what she did—that was not natural order for her. She had to learn.”

"I understand that,” he said. He sipped his water, dispensed with the towel and the ice.

“Solas,” said Lea.

“Yes.”

“All of this is well and good, but power is not what I meant to discuss when I brought up Mythal.”

“What did you mean to discuss?”

“I meant—” She took a deep breath. She looked at him. “She lives.”

Solas nodded, simply. “Yes, she does.”

Lea nodded. She understood completely, though she somehow became smaller. She didn’t cry, but her voice grew hushed and seemed to shake. She played with the edge of the tablecloth, pressed it between her fingers and thumbs. “When I—At the time that I became ill,” she said, “you and Mythal were so serious.”

“I loved her,” said Solas. “I did. After you, she made the rebellion possible. She gave me everything. Saved me from myself. I loved her more than I believe she knew.”

“I know this,” said Lea.

“But time passed,” said Solas. “When she returned, it was over. Nothing could have changed that. I still think of her, of course. But it’s over.”

“I’m sorry,” said Lea. “I’m not prying. I know a lot of time has passed, and I am proud—that you found a way to move on. I’m just thinking now, about what happened to her. Before you entered Uthenera, after the Veil, I know what happened to you, Solas.”

“I got very drunk,” he said, looking her plain in the eye. “I destroyed Skyhold, or at least what it used to be. I scared Abelas. I damaged our friendship. And I took my revenge.”

“Is Abelas alive?”

“Yes,” said Solas. “Though I don’t know what’s become of him. I hope very much that he is okay.”

“I wanted to go to you, Solas,” said Lea, shaking her head, “once you were asleep. But it had only been five years. I couldn’t make it take. I was a ghost. I tried, but I couldn’t reach. And then it all got very fast, and everything changed. You were not okay for such a long time. I know—I know what it must been like for you.”

Solas was very serious. “Yes, I know you do.”

“You had no one, vhenan.” She had begun to cry, quietly. “I am so sorry.”

“Do not be sorry,” said Solas. “You were gone. I got through it, and then Mythal was gone, and I got through that, and then I woke up, and I got through some more, and here I am, and I am not alone.” He reached across the table, took her hands into his, felt their softness, their give. “It’s been thousands of years. You taught me how to be loved. I got lost for a while, but I never forgot.”

The little tears fell down and dampened her sleeves. “It’s such a silly thing, to cry,” she said, and she sort of laughed. “I hate to cry.”

Solas was strong. “I know you do.”

He released her hands. She dried her tears with a napkin and reached across the table and took him by the ears. “It’s good to see you,” she said.

He was pleased. “It is good to see you, too.”

Then she sat back in her chair and collected herself, just like that. She was a plain woman and very simple at the core. She did not over-complicate her sense of self or satisfaction in any single moment. She was a little like Sene that way. “I think I have a deck of cards around here somewhere,” she went on, “though you should probably get some rest.”

“Cards would be good,” said Solas, and then he picked up the ice in the towel and pressed it to his jaw once more. Lea smiled and got up from the table, started rifling through the drawers in the kitchen.

He watched her go about this in deserved comfort. The room smelled like rose cookies and tea.

 

V.

Outside, across the river, the three women waited. The river was very cold and very clear. Sene could see all the way to the bottom, and it was swimming with a thousand silver, pink-eyed minnows. “Why do I keep hearing horses?” she said.

"I don’t know,” said Cassandra. “But I do, too. It is...unnerving.”

Sera waved her hand in front of her face, like she was trying to shove aside the fog. She looked very concerned. “Quiz?” she said. “How long do we wait here for?”

"As long as it takes.” Sene stared hard across the river of mists. She thought she saw something, but whatever shapes there were just kept changing into other shapes. It was infuriating. The hut was gone.

“Little All-Mother,” said Sera. “She is not so big.”

“She is an ancient elf of tremendous wisdom and knowledge,” said Cassandra. “No matter what she looks like, we mustn’t forget.”

Sene felt troubled, tried not to think about the truth.

Sera looked at her hand as if it were a foreign object.

Cassandra sighed. The world seemed to sigh right back.

“What the fuck was that?” said Sene, out of nowhere, looking up.

“What the fuck was what?” said Sera.

There was a noise then, a loud crack. They all looked around. It took them a minute to realize what was going on, but then Sene felt a jolt in her wrist. It was the anchor. It blipped and glowed green. She clutched her hand to her chest. “Shit,” she said. She looked at Cassandra.

“Quiz?” said Sera.

“There must be a rift somewhere,” said Cassandra.

“Where?” said Sene, growing frantic. “I can’t see anything.”

“On your guard,” said Cassandra. “Now.”

Sene shook out her hand, nocked an arrow as the green magic whipped. The other two women drew their weapons blind. They squinted hard as the moon came out in full. The mist began to lift off the river in slow increments. Across, they could see now. It was an empty meadow and a herd of wild horses in the moonlight—seven or eight of them, white as winter. At first, they were merely agitated, but then they broke into a full stampede, heading straight for the water.

The women ducked out of the way as the horses passed. The water from the river was cold and stung their faces.

“Sene,” said Cassandra.

“What?”

She was pointing. "There."

Winking in the sky, across the river, was a tiny rift in the Veil. It gleamed, hovering over the meadow. Several tall, sad demons had come through, conducting their magical pain in the air, scaring the horses, making their sick noises and moping across the grass, as if lost. They seemed to flank their leader, a great demon of Pride.

“Andraste’s fucking tits,” said Sera. “Where the fuck is Mythal.”

“I’m here,” said Mythal. Her high voice. She was standing right behind them.

“Fuck,” said Sene. “Where did you come from?”

“I told you it would not be long.”

The noises from the demons were getting louder now. They had seen the women, who braced for the attack. But Mythal became hurried, like she knew what to do. The revelation surprised her. She dropped to her knees, opened the leather pack on the muddy bank of the river. The Pride demon yanked its ugly whip. It was a mean specimen, and Cassandra shouted for instruction.

“Wait,” said Mythal. She had her head tilted back. She closed her eyes. She put her hands on the orb—no longer a tin sphere but a darkly glittering planet, and when she did this, the entire world became silent as ice. Sene watched the sky. It changed. Ten thousand white birds came pouring in from the stars, swarming the meadow. Screeching, their claws and beaks and yellow eyes. The sky moved and sang above them, and then a bright light consumed them all and put them to sleep, and when Sene opened her eyes again, she was flat on her back, and the world was white. It had begun to snow. Like a freak winter storm.

She looked around, shaken. Sera and Cassandra were there, too, rubbing their heads, trying to get to their feet. She saw Mythal, still hunched over the orb on the bank of the river. She had her head down, her chin tucked deep into her chest, and she was covered in a gentle magic that seemed to glow from within. It vibrated—she vibrated for a moment, and then she took her hands off the orb and tipped over into the water like a muddy dishrag. The splash was quiet. The demons on the other side of the river were dead. The rift had stitched itself shut, a bluish scar in the air.

“Mythal?” said Sene. She rushed, light-headed, dragged Mythal to shore.

Mythal coughed up a gutful of water, got on her hands and knees and wretched and then collapsed into the weeds. Sene waited by her side until the episode seemed complete, and then Mythal sat back on her heels and rubbed her eyes and shook out her hair. She was sopping wet. The glow from within had gone, and so had the birds, but the snow was still falling, and the air was crisp. Mythal looked up into the sky like a prayer answered. Sera and Cassandra joined them at the river. Sera was knocking her head with the heel of her hand. Cassandra was staring up at the sky. Sene buttoned up the pack, the orb hidden within. The anchor had quieted completely, and nobody spoke for a long time.

Seeing stars, seeing birds, seeing snow.

Mythal looked at Sene as if reading her mind. “We can go now,” she said.

“Are you okay?” said Sene.

Mythal smiled, but she was not surprised at this, not at Sene and her earnest nature. Not anymore. She was tired, and she felt like her skin was sort of hanging off her bones. “Yes.” She smoothed her hair, smoothed her hands over her armor, so used to wearing a dress. “Thank you for asking, Sene,” she said, glancing back to the other side of the river, the meadow there. “I know what to do.”

 She led them across the river.

“What happened to the hut?” said Cassandra, looking around, still incredulous.

“It goes in and out,” said Mythal. 

“In and out of where?” said Sera.

Mythal did not answer.

They crossed the meadow, picking around the dead demons, the blue rift scar glowing in the sky over their heads. It was still snowing, and yet, the trees seemed full of fireflies. The sky was still very dark. It was the dead of night. Sene was carrying the orb now. Mythal wanted nothing to do with it. It was heavier, Sene thought. Though she knew it was just an illusion. She suddenly became very worried, but the feeling was vague. She pictured Solas standing in the snow and tried to tell herself that nothing could ever change him, that he had some sense of self at the core, that he was _him,_ and this was essential, and the _him_ he was, that’s the _him_ she knew. Maybe, in that sense, Abelas actually had been right in Crestwood. _A man is his heart._ It was confusing, but he had to be. It's just that his heart was so much more than simply her. She missed Solas so much, she could feel herself poking around her memory for something hard to hang onto. She so rarely did this. She felt his hands. She saw his eyes when he smiled. You don’t really have to remember the people you love when you see them every day. They’re like a constant.

“This is it,” said Mythal.

They came to a hard stop.

“Another eluvian?” said Cassandra.

Sene looked up. There was a big, rootless mirror glowing at them, leaning against an old well. It looked like it had been moved there many years ago. The earth had claimed it. Little vines full of white flowers grew up and down its silver frame.

“Where does this one lead?” said Sene, looking at Mythal.

Mythal held out her hand. She touched the surface of the mirror. It seemed to come awake, like an animal. “Something is different,” she said.

“Uh, like what?” said Sera.

“I’m not sure,” said Mythal.

Then she went into the mirror, just like that.

It was beautifully cold here. The other women all looked at each other through the falling snow. They all held hands. Sene nodded once, and they followed the little All-Mother through the mirror. 

 

V.

They surfaced at the bottom of a very deep well, under water, close together. The water was dark, and the well was narrow, but they broke the surface quickly, and it was a small moment of panic when they did. Sera gasped for air, screaming that she could not swim.

“Sera, you know how to swim!” said Sene.

“Well what the blimey fuck?” she said, clinging to Cassandra. “Where’s the mirror? And where’s the All-Mother?”

“I’m up here,” said Mythal. She called down from up above. “There are pegs in the side, like a ladder."

“Where’s the mirror?” shouted Sene. Sera had already started up the pegs. Cassandra followed close after her.

“I don’t know,” said Mythal. 

“Where are we?”

No answer.

It took them a while to get all the way to the top. When they did, they each climbed out of the well, one by one, like wet cabbages. Sera coughed and beat her fists into a high tree. Cassandra shook out her hair. She took off her chest plate and tossed it away and stretched. This was a wooded place, small and humid, and very beautiful. Like a valley with a thick canopy, hills on all sides, but it was daytime here. You could tell by the light coming through the trees, the bees buzzing, and this was confusing at first, but not really. The air was thick and dramatic with jasmine and roses and thyme. The smell almost dizzied them. Cassandra became startled when a little fawn approached bravely from the bushes and licked her hand. “Maker’s breath,” she said. The fawn ran away.

Sene’s hair, when sopping wet, seemed to weigh twenty pounds. She wrung it out like a literal mop. Sera helped her put it into a tight braid, but her hands were shaking.

“What’s happening?” she said to Sene. “Don’t like this. Mirrors that stick you underwater?”

“It’s okay,” said Sene. "Sera, it's okay."

“I feel lost is all.”

Sene turned around. She hugged her friend tight. They both smelled like some kind of magical well water. Or maybe it wasn’t magical at all. They just smelled like the earth. “We’re not lost,” she said.

“How do you know?”

"I just do."

“Where _is_ Mythal?” said Sera finally, looking around.

Cassandra was next to them now, in just pants and an undershirt. She’d discarded the entirety of her armor and pointed. “She went up that hill."

 

Solas was helping his mother in the garden. She had been showing him how she built the fence but then became distracted by the nasturtium.

“You did it all by hand?” he said, chewing a toothpick, leaning into the fence with his full weight, checking its integrity. The weather was cool, but the sun was warm. The other men were inside still, finishing their breakfast. The platter had been otherworldly, and they’d slept late. Solas hadn’t been able to sleep at all. Or, hardly. He slept a lick or two, but the Fade was like a distant dreaming. He kept waking up, thinking he’d heard a creak in the floorboards or an enemy at the gate. He thought he might lose his mind, but then morning came, as it always did.

“Yes, I did,” said Lea, tipping her yellow watering can into the nasturtium. “But I’m not you. There are spirits in the valley below. They gave me a hand when I needed it.”

"I could tighten some of the fasteners for you,” said Solas. “But it’s mostly well-done.”

“Well, I thank you,” she said. "I’ve got it. Though I know you’ll do it anyway, if you’re bored enough.”

He smirked, sat down in the grass to touch the little orange flowers. All he wanted was a toothpick and a stiff drink, to help with the garden, and some other things. She wore a wide-brimmed hat that morning and seemed not to have aged past the moment he last saw her. This put her at a fair forty-one—only about ten years older than he was now. It was strange in numbers, and yet it felt typical in many ways. He saw her no differently.

She got up and went to the wooden shelf. She swapped out her watering can for a thermos and took a long drink. Her hands and arms were dirty, and so were her knees. She wore a yellow cotton dress at a tea length. Solas looked up at the sky. Once, when he was a kid, his father had taken him on a trip to the city, just to two of them, and they went to the zoo where they ate fruit pastries and fed the elephants long stalks of grass. When they got home that night, his mother had tilled a small plot of soil and planted several rows of corn toward the edge of their property. But the next summer was the summer his father died. The corn had grown big and tall by then, waving at the purple clouds in evening, and it went on like that, no harvest, forever. When fall came, and the stalks dried out and turned brown, eerie and haunted, Solas and Ghilan'nain would spend the night outside them. He’d build a fire while she made wreathes from the detritus of the cornfield, and his mother would bring them rose cookies in a little tin and bowls of soup and two glasses of ice water. She always did this, every night, no matter what. She never forgot. She had no friends that he knew of, not after his father. She'd never had a single friend until Mythal.

When he’d got strong enough, he built a tent out there. Ghil rode her bike over every single day, and they’d spend at least part of it hanging out by the old, dead cornfield. This went on until they were teenagers, and then finally, his mother found the strength to dig out the dead roots and start over.

Now, she was leaning over the fence, staring at something, way off toward the yard out front, squinting into the sun.

“What’s the matter?” said Solas.

“I’m not sure,” said Lea.

Solas said nothing. He picked one of the nasturtium, closed it inside of his palm, and when he opened it again, a little butterfly flitted out and joined the others in the garden.

“Solas?” she said, rather serious.

“Yes."

“What does Sene look like again?”

“Why?”

“Tall, right?” said Lea. “Curly red hair?”

“That’s her.”

"I think she’s here.”

Solas stopped. He looked up. “What?”

“Yes,” said Lea. “Coming up from the valley. That must be her. Her, and two other women, all of them are very tall.”

Solas got up then, quickly. So fucking confused, he hopped the fence and went toward the yard without another question. The toothpick in his mouth, he discarded on the way, and then it became clear.

He saw her, Sene. He also saw Cassandra and Sera, still coming up the field a little ways behind, and up on the porch, with her hands pressed into the door and her head hanging between her shoulders, was Mythal, breathing hard. They were all here. All of them. He had no idea why or how. But here they were. Sene was just staring up at the treehouse, so tall, like she had never seen anything so magnificent in her entire life, and she looked exhausted and pretty, and he didn't know what to do.

He called out to her. “Sene?” 

She became startled, like waking from a trance. She turned to look at him from across the yard, and she was very surprised. She looked so strange out there, like she had been struck by lightning and tossed into the sea, then dispensed here—for no reason at all. Her hair was in a long, fat braid, but it looked wet at the bottom and half-dried on top, and there were pieces sticking up in every direction. She was rushing toward him now. She'd had her bow flung across her body, but she tossed it to the earth, and before he knew what had happened, they met in the middle.

“Solas?” she said, like she didn't believe it. "What the fuck?"

She put her hands on his cheeks, testing whether he was real. Her clothes were wet, sticking, and she was sweaty from climbing up out of the valley. She'd gotten a good deal of sun since he'd seen her last. Her freckles were brown, and she had dirt on her face, sunburn on her cheeks. She smelled like water.

He couldn't help it. He started putting pieces of wet hair behind her ear. "What are you doing here?" he said, smiling.

But she said nothing, just got on her tip-toes, and she kissed him on the mouth. He let her. He wanted to take her, right there. Peel the clothes off her wet skin. The need to be with her was strong. It was arousal, and relief, and excitement. He asked no more questions, thanked his lucky fucking stars. Then, they just clamped together, hugged each other real tight in the late winter sun.

 

There was a river, the treehouse, the well.  His mother coming out from the garden as the wind blew through, and the wind chimes sang their song of emptiness and joy. The men all came outside, sensing the swell of reunion. Sera and Cassandra found them right quick. Meanwhile, Mythal looked back from the porch, ragged, but still somehow hanging on. It had been the most fucked-up day. It had been the most fucked-up everything. She was lonely, despite her trustworthy women and her vessels and her ex-lover who she still loved more than life itself, though he loved another, and she was happy for this but also ruined in some old, deep ways that she truly hoped would one day fade, so she had been crying very hard. But now it was relief, and her face was a little piece of familiar sadness, beautiful as birds and made new, and she had held onto hope for all these years, somehow, and she knew it had been for good reason as she stood on the porch of the treehouse.

Lea rushed to her friend who was crying on the porch steps. She took off her hat. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Playlist songs for this chapter include "Landslide" and "Storms" by Fleetwood Mac. (YouTube links [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_PQ4fRQ5Kc) and [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ta4wChZ8q7Y).)
> 
> [Link](https://open.spotify.com/user/galadrieljones/playlist/0n9HPvx4lk5dEDXKaPwEqb) to the full playlist for _The Dead Season_ on Spotify. 
> 
> I made a small post not long ago, on tumblr, elaborating on the significance of some of the songs on the playlist. Link [here](http://galadrieljones.tumblr.com/post/161829815111/music-shuffle), if you're interested. :-)
> 
> Thanks for reading, as always, so much. Just a reminder, too, that I value my readers deeply, and because we're getting closer to the end, I am starting to feel kind of sentimental. ;_; So if you like the story, I encourage you to leave me a little note here. Only if you like, of course, or you can always drop me an ask, anon or not, over at [tumblr](http://galadrieljones.tumblr.com/ask). In any case, ily always. <3 -gala


	52. Perfect Creatures

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “It was still twilight when they reached the flat rock. They sat, and the stone still held the warmth of the day's sun. At first there were only occasional sparkles, but as it got darker Chuck was lost in a daze of delight as a galaxy of fireflies twinkled on and off, flinging upward in a blaze of light, dropping earthward like falling stars, moving in continuous effervescent dance.” 
> 
> ― Madeleine L'Engle, _A Swiftly Tilting Planet_

In the garden, they waited. And talked. Solas told her about everything that had happened. Varric, the Viddasala, Dorian and Thom. They’d all been through their collective reunion, and by now, they could see Cassandra lying on her back, stretched out to high heaven in the front yard. Bull and Dorian leaned against each other in a state of rest nearby. Thom chopped firewood, eager to earn his keep while Sera, eating fresh strawberries plucked straight from the earth, sat on a tree stump and chirped dearly in his ear. Mythal had become distraught, and so Lea took her inside. She was not okay, but she would be. This was a safe place, and the gods were watching over them here. 

The wind blew through like dusty fingers. The leftovers from the sandstorm still stung their eyes. Solas made Sene a butterfly that just perched in her hair like a watchful companion, and the sky was a blanched and faraway blue. The air was crisp but filled with light. Sene picked him a flower and tucked it behind his ear. He smirked, and they leaned against the fence like old times. They held hands and knocked their knees together. Sene was anxious, and Solas could tell, but she did not speak of it. When he asked her why they had come and how they’d gotten here, she was hesitant to say. “We were looking for your mother,” she said. She looked away. “You should really just to talk to Mythal.”

He drew quiet. This bothered him. He stared at her, like he was waiting for her to change her mind. "Are you sure?" he said.

She nodded, tucked the hair behind her ears. "I'm sure."

He did not press any further. Instead, he merely sighed, like whatever it was, it wasn't worth it, not yet. Solas seemed so solid, thought Sene, so healed. His ribs and head all better—he was no longer constricted by pain. His jaw was bruised, but that was nothing. She’d taken off all her armor and heavy leather and left it on the porch to dry and was now just a pretty redhead in the sun. Her undershirt was yellow, the color of cream, and her hair was down.

Lea came out not long after. She looked rushed as she smoothed her dress and entered the garden. Solas stood first and helped Sene to her feet. Lea had put on lipstick while inside—like a plum. She smiled with big, glorious teeth and put the hair behind her ear. She held out her hand.

“You must be Sene,” she said. “I’m Lea. I’m so pleased to meet you.”

Sene smiled, but she did not take Lea’s hand. She just went forward and hugged her, as hard as she could. This took Lea by surprise, especially because Sene was such a tall specimen and very strong, but she was grateful, and she hugged back. Solas was chewing on a hairpin. He had his hands in his pockets. This was a moment he never could have foreseen or guessed in nine thousand years. He had no words. He simply watched, and waited.

“I can’t believe it,” said Sene. She pulled back and held onto Lea’s shoulders. She had little, warm tears in her eyes. She was so happy. She looked back at Solas. “It’s her.”

Lea laughed. Solas smiled. “Yes, vhenan. I know.”

Sene became very emotional. She sniffled and wiped her nose on the back of her wrist. She returned to Solas who took her hand. “Is Mythal going to be okay?” she said.

“Yes,” said Lea. “Mythal tends toward dramatics when she is upset. But she is very easy to console, once she lets you in. She just needs some time.”

Sene nodded, looked down at her boots.

“Would you like to see the inside of the tree house?” said Solas.

“Yes,” said Sene. “I would.”

“The two of you go,” said Lea, picking up her watering can. “Solas, maybe you can round everybody up, and get Sene something dry to change into. I’ll finish up out here and see you in the kitchen.”

“What’s in the kitchen?” said Solas. He removed the hairpin from his teeth, stuck it in his pocket. Sene sort of gazed up at him.

“Dinner,” said Lea as she tipped the watering can into the great, orange nasturtium. She was like a lamp in the darkness in the great blue middle of the world. Full of mystery and care taking and hope.

 

Sene went inside. She looked around. She touched the white curtains and the wooden counter tops, and she was fascinated by the running water in the faucet, the sink with a drain. Solas had stayed outside, went to tell the others to meet in the kitchen. Sene watched him, careful, a tall, handsome silhouette through a huge bay window. Sunset was a sticky treat on the horizon, and she thought a lot about Ansburg. There was an ocean out there somewhere, she thought. She could smell it on the breeze. There were moments when she couldn’t tell whether it was warm or cold outside. It somehow seemed to be both. No matter what she did or where she went, the weather was comfortable.

She went up the tight, spiral staircase to find their quarters, wondered how the fuck Bull had managed this the night before. The hallway upstairs was narrow and the walls were all solid, shiny wood. There were knots in the wood overhead, there were vines moving in and out of branches that wound so tightly together they formed a ceiling. There were many rooms, at least four, and another staircase still at the end of the hall.

At some point, she forgot where she was headed. It was all so strange and pretty, a natural wonder, and she couldn't tell which room she was supposed to be in. She passed by an open doorway at some point, and there inside, she saw Mythal—sitting at a little, white vanity, looking in the mirror, and brushing her hair. The backpack with the orb was on the bed. Mythal seemed dreamy as the wind came through and rustled the drapes. Sensing Sene, she set down the brush and tucked her hands in her lap. She looked down at her knees, as if embarrassed. She had changed clothes—was wearing a loose, gray dress with lovely blue embroidering around the collar. She glanced to Sene, puffy-eyed, but no longer crying. Sene felt an enormous connection to her then, for what seemed like no reason at all. She stood in the doorway, unsure of what to do or say.

“I caused a scene,” said Mythal, looking back to the mirror. “I’m sorry. I hope I didn’t spoil anything.”

“No,” said Sene. “It’s okay. I understand.”

“Do you?” said Mythal, almost hopeful, touching her brown, shiny hair.

Sene sighed. “Not really,” she said. “But I can try.”

Mythal smiled at this, just a little, and her cheeks were flushed. Sene entered the room slowly. She sat down on the brass double bed. It squeaked. There were fresh cut flowers in blue bottles and apothecary jars all over the room. Daisies in potted soil. The molding along the floorboards and the ceiling was painted white and rustic, and there was a wardrobe and a bureau made of a hard, dark wood. Hanging from the mirror at the vanity was a flower crown in many pale colors, but all the flowers looked dried and crispy. Sene wondered what its initial purpose had been.

Mythal opened the drawer in the vanity. She took out a little red velvet box. “Would you like to see something romantic?” she said, looking over her shoulder.

“Sure,” said Sene.

Mythal got up from the chair, went and sat down next to Sene on the bed. It was high, and she had to hop up and her feet dangled off the edge. It didn’t matter how small or weird Mythal was, she was very pretty, even when puffy-eyed and unadorned, and Sene always felt dwarfed in her presence, and young, and too tall. She became gawky. It would take Sene a long time to come to terms with her own bodily strangeness. For now, she was still a little unsure. She did not know how Mythal saw her. Like a tall, warm column of ribbon and sun. A lighthouse. They were so different, and they would never be friends, not really, but at times, they understood each other.

The wind was cool on their cheeks. Sene was still dirty and half-dressed. Mythal popped open the velvet box. Inside was a smooth wooden ring. She held it in her palm. It was big. Sene picked it up, read the inscription on the inside. It was in perfect cursive: _Marin, House of Leanathy._

“Is this his wedding band?” said Sene.

“Yes,” said Mythal.

Sene felt a heavy weight in her chest. “It’s so simple. _House of Leanathy_. Is that how names worked in Elvhenan?”

Mythal nodded. Sene handed her the ring, and she placed it gently back inside the box. “Men took the names of their wives. Women and children took the names of their patriarchs. It was a signal. Who protected who. That’s how tradition told it, at least.”

“So Solas really doesn’t have a last name, and neither do you?”

“Surnames are new,” said Mythal. “At least to us.”

Sene nodded, picking at a callus on her palm. “It makes sense,” she said. “Last names work differently in Dalish culture as well.”

“How so?” said Mythal.

“Everyone in my clan bears the Lavellan name, but we’re not all blood,” said Sene. “My family is, and a few others, and our Keeper, Deshanna, too. He’s a true Lavellan, my great uncle. But we’ve absorbed a great many smaller clans over the years, most of which were already comprised of farmers, who approached us, and they allowed their names to be superseded by ours. They still keep their old names, like middle names, but the Lavellan name is important, so they wear it, proudly. I suppose.”

“But _you_ are an original to your clan,” said Mythal. “That is a great honor. Do you have any siblings?”

“No,” said Sene. “I did once, but she got sick when she was a baby, and she died when I was little. I don’t remember her at all. I have several cousins. One of them, Terys, he’s almost my age, and sort of like a brother.”

“I have no siblings either,” said Mythal. “I was the one and only. I’m sorry about your sister.”

“Thanks,” said Sene. “But you don’t have to.”

Mythal set the velvet box down on the white quilt. Behind them, the orb hummed. Sene could still see the birds, hear their war cries, taste the snow.

“Sene,” said Mythal, gentle.

“Yes.”

“I know you were afraid to tell him,” she said. “About the orb. I can feel the secret.”

“I don’t know how to explain,” said Sene.

“I just want you to know that he will still be Solas,” said Mythal, looking down at the little velvet box. “He will still be the man you know. Nothing will be scary. Nothing will change in his heart.”

Sene swallowed, hard. She nodded and bit off a hangnail, and then she looked up at the ceiling. The room grew dim with the setting sun. When she looked hard enough, she noticed that the white paint on the ceiling had little shapes in it—shapes of flowers and bugs. Like inlays. They were so subtle. She had to squint.

She found Solas’s room not long after. It was at the very end of the hall, and it had a tall door that was painted blue. Inside, there was a big bed with wooden posts, a bureau, a desk, and a lot of plants. There was a great, wide window. It was so clear, she could see almost down into the valley below, past the hills. Everything in the room was made of heavy wood and beautifully hewn, and Sene was not sure how Lea had done this, all of this, all by herself. Perhaps it was a typical power for an ancient elf, but to Sene, it seemed extraordinary. She found no real similarities between this room and the room she’d visited in Solas’s old house in the Fade. In fact, the entire treehouse was streamlined and clean and big in ways that the old house seemed to purposely avoid. The Fade house had been lovely and warm and kept pretty with the butterflies in the jars, making light in the kitchen. But it was small, and it was packed with stuff, like books and herbs and pottery and strange objects made of glass. It was somewhat ragtag, patchwork quilts of all colors draped over the couch, looking like hand-me-downs from distant relatives. It was rural, and haphazard, a mess.

This place, however, this was something else. This was royal. It felt fully developed and covered in a sheen that reminded Sene of the Winter Palace, though it was obviously nothing like the Winter Palace, it just shared an essential purity of breeding at its beating heart. Sene could feel it here—Leanathy’s noble birth. As if she had been reborn and found a way to put it to use without hating herself. She had built a palace made of trees, all by her lonesome. And it still had a certain country smallness and inconvenience about it in certain ways, like the narrow staircase and the hallways with the rustic ceilings, how the kitchen was very small. This made it feel real, like a home, and it reminded Sene a little of the Fade house, and she thought maybe it reminded Solas, too. She thought vaguely about the hurt in his heart, and she waited.

 

Downstairs in the kitchen, Solas was looking around the room. He was looking for Sene.

“She must still be upstairs,” said someone. Cassandra, he thought. She was putting on a red apron, Sera helping her tie it in the back. She seemed quieter than usual, but then again, Cassandra had never been the type of woman to speak freely, or even often. In close quarters, when it was just friends and booze and camping, she could be quite outgoing, even funny. At times, she employed a girlish sensibility, and so she got along well with Sene and Sera, who were not girls by any stretch, but they were a great deal younger, and they certainly didn’t put much stock into stoicism or seriousness.

His mother came in then. She was flanked by Bull and Dorian, each of them carrying a heavy basket of root vegetables. “We are going to make a vegetable bake and sweet potatoes and white fish,” she said. The room cheered. She looked at Solas. “Everything okay?”

“Yes,” he said. He crossed the room, kissed her quickly on the top of the head. “Where is Thom?”

“Outside,” said Bull. “Guy can’t get enough of that firewood.”

“He’s being very useful,” said Lea. “I tried to get him to stop, but he insisted.”

Solas smiled, shoved his hands in his pockets. “I’ll be back,” he said.

Outside, he found that Thom had quit with the chopping. He was sitting on a fat tree stump, the axe leaning beside him, smoking and drinking a glass of water and watching the sun melt through the trees into the valley below. The sky was full of whimsy.

Solas sat down on the ground beside him, knees pulled up. Thom passed him the joint, and Solas took a soft hit. It was weak, but in the right ways. He passed it back and blew the smoke out the corner of his mouth. “Where’d you find the elfroot?”

“Scraped what was left out the bottom of my pocket,” said Thom. “Mostly leftover from Kirkwall.”

“We’ll head back soon,” said Solas. “To Kirkwall, then to Skyhold. I know what this seems like, but I don’t intend to stay very long. Perhaps another night or two. Knowing my mother is alive—that is enough. Sene and I can come back in the future, when it’s more convenient for everyone.”

Thom glanced around. “It is an odd place, this place. But I like it.” Then, he looked down at Solas. “Speaking of the Inquisitor, shouldn’t the two of you be upstairs, consummating your reunion by now?”

Solas smiled down into the blades of grass between his feet.

“What’s the matter, elf? You’re brooding.”

“She’s keeping something from me,” said Solas. “She does not usually keep things from me. That is not like Sene.”

“You mean about why they’re here?”

“Yes,” said Solas. “I know it’s to do with my power, repairing the Veil. I can sense that she’s worried about something.”

“The two of you overcame a major obstacle with Mythal’s return,” said Thom. “Your ex hanging around like this, being a goddess and best friends with your mother and all that. It can’t be easy for Sene. Go ask her again, what’s going on. Be firm. She’ll tell you the truth.”

Solas nodded, flexed his jaw. “I had not thought of all that," he said. "Thank you.”

“Of course," said Thom. He finished off the joint and put it out between his fingertips. Then, “Can I tell you something, Solas, that I’ve noticed about you?”

Solas smirked. “Sure.”

Thom leaned forward, elbows on his knees, watching the air get purple in front of him. “Here’s the thing, elf. On the battlefield, or in the negotiations chambers, you are a kind of maniac. You never hesitate. There is no fear in your heart. You have perfect confidence, and it’s why you always win. It’s how you took out that assassin in Kirkwall. It’s how you got us out of the Darvaarad alive. Shit, it’s how you got me out of prison in Val Royeaux."

"And?" said Solas.

"And," said Thom, "you are better at getting what you want than any man I’ve ever met, and I have met plenty of silver tongued men who are very good with the sword. That being said, with Sene, you continue to question yourself. You don’t think she’s forgiven you. But she has." He took a deep breath, pulled a hand through his beard. "Listen to me. Sometimes, women just need to be nudged, reminded to do the right thing. They are imperfect creatures, for most intents and purposes, the same as us.” He looked down at Solas, slyly, took a drink of water. “I know you understand this, but are you hearing me?”

Solas looked up at him, feeling earnest. “I hear you,” he said.

Daylight was getting older now. The fireflies had begun their blinking. These talks with Thom, they were so freeing and necessary. A kind of understanding between men that Solas had never known.

 

Meanwhile, up in Solas’s room, Sene began to hear voices downstairs in the kitchen. Muffled, but sure. She wasn't sure yet if she should join them. She didn’t really care that much about changing her clothes, as she was already pretty dry, but she was a little itchy, and she wanted a bath, but there was no time. So she started going through the drawers anyway, just to see what was there. She was curious. Most of the clothes she found were very simple. They looked like Solas’s clothes, but maybe from another time. This enchanted her and almost made her cry, it was so beautiful all of a sudden. It wasn't overwhelming or scary. The history here. She found a white cotton shirt, and she unfolded it, and she took off her pale yellow undershirt, and she put the new one on instead. It was soft and baggy, and she hugged it to her nose and breathed. It smelled good, like lavender, like when her mother used to do her laundry growing up, and it always came out smelling like lavender. It had taken Sene a while to figure out why this was. She always assumed it was just this thing that mothers could do. They had this superpower. You gave them your dirty laundry in big, misshapen piles, and it came back folded into neat squares, smelling like lavender. She knew now it was just an essential oil, made with care or purchased from the market. A single drop did the trick. Still, it impressed her no less, and in some ways, made her only appreciate the gesture more.

She looked in the mirror over the bureau. It was a wide mirror and very tall. Her cheeks were kind of burned from the sun, and her hair was an ungodly mess.

“Fuck,” she said to nobody. She began to pick apart the braid, piece by piece. She wondered if maybe Mythal would let her borrow that hairbrush, though she probably needed one made of metal or she might break it in two. Besides, no matter what she had felt before, Sene did not want to go back into that room with Mythal. Not now. Mythal was a dark princess of dreaming, far away, from another world. She was wise, but she was so sad, all the time, like a ballerina living in a music box, and she longed to escape. Sene felt a tightening in her gut. She hated anxiety. She never took it with her anywhere. It was usually so easy to defuse, but this time, it wouldn’t go away. She leaned forward against the bureau and put her head in her hands. “I want to go home,” she whispered, but she did not know what this meant.

Solas came in then. He opened the door, slowly, and then when he saw her, he smiled, and he closed the door behind him. She straightened up off the bureau and tugged at the shirt. She pressed her palms to her eyes. She hadn’t been crying, but she’d been close. He leaned against the door with his hands in his pockets, watching her. She could see him in the mirror.

“Hey,” she said first.

“You look pretty, vhenan,” he said.

This made her blush. It was unexpected. She turned around. “What took you so long?”

“I was talking to Thom,” he said.

“How’s he doing?”

“He’s just fine,” said Solas. “Everyone’s inside now, helping with the cooking. I have no idea what’s in store, but I do know my mother has never once cooked for more than three people at a time, so she’ll need all the help she can get.”

“I find that hard to believe.” Sene smiled and looked down at her boots.

“Sene.”

“Yeah?”

He straightened up off the door, came toward her. He put a feral curl behind her ear. “You’re keeping something from me,” he said. “You told me to talk to Mythal, but I don’t want to.”

The look on his face pained her. Now she thought she might cry. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be sorry,” he went on. “Just talk to me.”

“I know I should,” said Sene.

“I know the orb is here. I can feel it. Whatever it is, Sene, it’s okay.”

She sighed. She swallowed hard and looked away, out the great big window. “I don’t know how.”

“Try,” he said.

She looked at him, hard. “We didn’t know you’d be here,” she said. “That was a coincidence.”

“Of course it was,” said Solas.

“But Mythal had a plan to help restore your old power,” she went on. “She fixed your orb. Dagna helped, then Flemeth, and now, she needs Lea, but she didn’t know if Lea was really alive, so she didn’t want to tell you yet. Just in case. She wanted me to be the one—to tell you. If we failed.” Sene cleared her throat. “She asked for my help getting here, and maybe I shouldn’t have, Solas, but I trust her. Because I think you trust her, and she seems…trustworthy. Even though she’s so sad, and she doesn’t always say the right thing, but neither do I. She said it would help you fix the Veil, that this is something you have to do and could not do on your own, and that to help—that’s all she wants. To help. That’s why we’re here. I’m sorry I didn’t just tell you before.”

Outside, it was all turning dark, daylight gone for good. Solas was staring at her, studying, but he didn’t look angry. Not at all, just like he was parsing through the details, the math in his head. The valley down below was boiling, ancient, and you could feel it everywhere. He glanced out the window, and he took a deep breath, and then he looked at her. “All right,” he said.

“Mythal said your mother can purify magic,” said Sene. “I don’t know what that means. But I think it means that she can take Mythal’s magic and somehow make it yours. Mythal put her magic in the orb. Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” he said, but he was distant.

“Solas,” said Sene.

“Yes.”

“Did you hear me?”

“I did,” he said. He looked at her. “Why were you so afraid to tell me this?”

“Because,” she said.

“You understand. Not the particulars, but you’re an intelligent person, Sene, and you’ve read enough books and been around enough magic this past year to understand. Don’t you trust yourself?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Are you afraid of something?”

“Yes,” she said. She looked right at him now. She did not want to lie. “I am.”

“Of what, vhenan? Of me? My old magic?”

“No,” said Sene, coming free. “I saw Mythal’s magic, out there. She used it to help us in the Korcari Wilds. Birds and snow and white light. It was bizarre, put me flat on my back. But it wasn’t scary. It felt…good. It felt pure.”

“Then what are you afraid of?”

“That the power will change you,” she said. “That it will hurt you. That you’ll go backward. I don’t want to go backward, Solas. Not after everything. Not anymore.”

It was like a sort of flower exploding to life between them, coming alive, the idea that him going backward meant that she would have to go backward as well. The two of them, digging a hole in the earth and filling it with water, and paddling to shore. He grazed the edge of her ear with his knuckles, and he became very serious.

“What?” she said.

“You heard me in the Fade, Sene,” he said. “At the bar, with the girls singing in the background. I’m not going backward.”

“What if you can’t help it?”

“I can,” he said. He shrugged. “This is not an issue, Sene. I’ve always been the same man. Barring a few breakdowns and improvements over the years, I’ve always been the same man. Ancient power not withstanding. Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” she said, thinking about the shirts in the dresser drawers. “Yes, I do.”

“If Mythal succeeds in restoring my magic so that I may repair the Veil, then that is something to be celebrated, not feared. She _can_ be trusted. I believe she can. You did the right thing.”

“Celebrated?”

“Yes. You can trust me. I know what to do.”

“Of course I trust you.”

He picked up her hand, the left one. The hand with the anchor. He was very calm. “Good,” he said. “Because when we leave here, Sene, there is much to do and see.”

She smiled. “Like what?”

“Like, at some point, I would like to marry you,” he said. There was a big wind then, outside, coming up and creaking the walls of the treehouse. “Not tomorrow,” he went on, “not the next day. I don’t know when. Whenever we want. But I would like to marry you, if that’s okay.”

It was an open window. Like her hair kind floating up on the beach and sticking in every direction. Like she’d been struck by lightning, everything catching inside, heart and lungs and guts all at once. Downstairs, there was a rambunctious laughter that shook them both—Sera, then Thom, swearing loudly. As if she’d dumped a whole pot of flour over his head. It would not have been the first time.

“You’re asking me to marry you?” said Sene.

“Yes, I am,” said Solas. He kissed her knuckles, and he held them to his chin, and he watched her, fixed on her—his focus, his patience. Lit gray eyes. His confidence, pure.

“You’re asking me here?”

“Is there somewhere else you would have liked me to ask you?”

“No, I just—did you plan to ask me here?”

“Obviously not,” said Solas. “I did not know that you’d be at my mother’s magical tree palace in the middle of ancient nowhere. I did not even know that I would be here.”

“But you’ve been thinking about it, about asking me.”

“Of course I have,” he said. “Ever since you told me in the Fade about how you’d thought you might be pregnant, I have been thinking about it. Since before that, I was thinking about it, but before that, it did not feel like a possibility. Now, it feels like a possibility.”

She was blushing, very hard. “Really?”

“Yes,” he said. “Have you thought about it, at all?”

“A little,” said Sene. “Always in passing. Deshanna asked me point blank if you were someone I would consider marrying.”

“What did you tell him.”

“Mostly to fuck off.”

Solas smiled.

“I don’t really think about these things,” said Sene. “Not until they happen.”

“Well, it’s happening,” said Solas. “Will you answer my question?”

“Which question?” she said.

“Will you marry me?”

It took her a moment. She was not lost for words. It’s just that Sene wasn’t really any good at words, or precious moments. Sometimes, when she had to be, like when she had to be Inquisitor and that time she had to fuck up Grand Duchess Florianne in front of everyone at the masquerade in the Winter Palace, she could pull something out of her ass, but usually, there was a little booze involved, and it was like tripping, and flailing, adrenaline, and stupid all the time. She was losing focus.

“Sene?” said Solas.

She looked at him. The question, it was in his heart, in the air between them. It was real. She nodded. “Yes,” she said.

“Yes?” he said.

She grabbed him by the ears. She kissed him. He was hesitant at first, but things changed. They sped up, and soon the two of them were locked together. She could hear him, feel him responding to her, his hands on her skin, losing his control. They hadn’t touched in six weeks. He put her up on the bureau. It made a loud noise against the wall. It was like she was ripping open, spilling it all into the earth.

“Say it again,” said Solas, his lips at her ear. He tugged the shirt over her head, tossed it to the floor, and he looked at her. He held her chin in his hand. “Your answer, say it again.”

“Yes,” she said. Her heart a massive, thumping animal in her chest. She put her palms on his cheeks. “Yes.”

He was a triumphant soldier. What was this boon he’d reaped? He smoothed her hair and kissed her, soft, like he was making a point. Staying, lingering right on the surface of her lips. Wait in the moment, stay. Patience, Solas. Just this once. It melted her down to nothing. He tasted like elfroot. Outside, it was night. The nighttime animals were making their show of lights and sounds. Meanwhile, Solas and Sene were something else. They took off all their clothes. They were free. They loved each other's bodies into the stars.

 

“Sene suits him,” said Mythal, scratching at her neck compulsively. She and Lea were outside, sitting on the porch, looking at the fireflies. Out past the lawn, the valley below hummed in secret. Dinner was almost ready inside. They could smell the fish in the frying pan, the orange potatoes in the oven.

Lea nudged Mythal’s hand back into her lap. “He is very open with her,” she said. “It’s true. They coexist, like water and earth. I will say that, yes, my son is happy.”     

“She does not allow him his theatrics,” said Mythal, staring out past the blue, nighttime grass. “What I once thought an indication of his strength was merely a performance it seems. A mask. I was a foolish woman.”

“Solas has changed,” said Lea. She linked her arm in Mythal’s, put her head on Mythal’s shoulder. “He is still as charming as ever, but he doesn’t use it like he once did. He doesn’t have to here. He’s calmer. People respect him. They expect greatness in his presence. That is something I have learned from spending time with his men.”

“I’m trying to find acceptance,” said Mythal. “I try, constantly.”

Inside, you could hear Dorian—he had initiated some sort of thought experiment with the others in the kitchen. _Let’s play marry, fuck, or kill,_ he said. Sera burst into laughter.

Lea sighed, smiled to herself. She looked at Mythal. “They’re good people.”

“Yes, they are,” said Mythal. “They’re all good. Every one of them.”

“My son has always been up against the odds,” said Lea. She put the hair behind Mythal’s ear, a mothering gesture. “It is why he plays them so well. In Arlathan, the other evanuris doubted him. They disrespected him to the grave because his birth was not to their liking. Even Ghil’s mother came to me once. Did I ever tell you that? When they were nineteen years old. She came over, knocked on my door, started spouting some bullshit about how Solas was not good enough for her precious daughter. Ghil’s father used to spread hateful rumors that Solas was a drug dealer, that he was a damning influence. We both know my son was no saint, but he has always been proud. He treated me with respect, and he loved Ghil when they were together, and he was honorable in his circles. He has earned a life in which he gets to live by his own standards, not those of people who place little to no value on his worth simply because of blood, or the fact that he is fatherless. Do you agree, Mythal?”

Mythal had heavy tears in her eyes. The light from the moon reflected inside them, making her cheeks molten and silver. “Yes, I do.”

“You loved him despite everything,” said Lea, “and I know that it preceded and transcended romance for you. You died protecting him, and so now, he lives again. It is no compensation, but for your valor in the end, I, as his mother, will be forever in your debt.”

Mythal began to cry now, seriously. She did not know how to stop. “I would do it again,” she said, burying her face in her hands. “I still love him. It kills me. Every night, I think of him before I fall asleep, and I experience the only peace I feel all day. But in the mornings, I cannot bear to live, Lea. I came here to ask for your help, but I don’t know what I am doing.”

“Mythal,” said Lea. “I love my son beyond words and thoughts, but he is just a man. He is _just a man_. He always was. And even after you restore his power, he will still be just a man. You have a second chance now. You must find your own path. You cannot do this to yourself forever.”

“I know that,” said Mythal. “But sleeping at Skyhold, our old home—it is not helping matters. I live in secret there, my heart hidden away. He gave our castle to Sene. A gift for her accidental faction of soldiers and spies. I do not blame him for this, as I was dead, and he loves her. Love is enough. I am not angry, but it is very hard, Lea.”

“Then don’t go back to Skyhold,” said Lea.

Mythal looked up. “What?”

“Stay here,” said Lea, gesturing to the yard. “After they leave, which I assume will not be long from now—I know they’ve all got lives to lead elsewhere, including my son—but after they leave, you can stay here for as long as you like. Or come and go as you please. It’s up to you, Mythal, but I’m not going anywhere. I like it here.” She smiled, looked around at this paradise she had forged all on her own.

Mythal looked up at Leanathy, awed, unused to such gracious receivings. She was still getting used to this world, to the kind, well-meaning hearts of its people. How they all just loved each other. They asked no questions. They just did it. The day could be ripped from their grasp at any moment, but rather than linger in the fear that they might lose everything, they just lived. A perfect faith. She wanted to be a part of it, mortality, but it amazed and eluded her, and it drove her crazy with its complicated comings and goings, its persistent demand that she simply let go and _trust._

Lea, on the other hand, had always known the ins and outs of the world. This world’s particular kindness, its comings and goings were like second nature to her. She belonged here. She just had no wish to partake in its institutional madness, not anything outside the smallness of her immediate life. The things she immediately loved. Like Solas, and gardening. She was never grasping, never wanting, even way back then. She just existed, and all that she felt, she put it into the perspective of a mother, somebody whose domain is small, but it represented more than a kitchen, a garden, a room all full of her son and his friends. It was everything Mythal wanted to understand, right here. She thought that maybe if she could just find one little corner of the world to occupy, then she could live in it, in the way she knew how. The way that suited her.

But for now.

“Oy, All-Mothers,” said Sera. She was standing in the doorway behind them, terribly crass but endearing. “We’re all ready in here when you are.”

Lea smiled, bright. Mythal wiped her tears compulsively, looked away in embarrassment.

“Are Solas and Sene downstairs yet?” said Lea.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Very good. Thank you, Sera. We’ll be right inside.”

Sera smiled, turned on her heels and let the screen door slam behind her.

“What a tall young woman,” said Lea. “All of them, so tall. It’s insane.”

But Mythal wasn’t listening anymore. She was looking at the fireflies. Fireflies. They were so pretty. Insects with fiery insides, out in full bloom. How was this not magic? she thought to herself. They made the world better. They glowed. They were pretty, and what was magic if not just a pretty, glowy means to an end? She was starting to sound like Sera. One day, she would figure this out.

 


	53. Bedtime Stories

The bedroom after dinner, it was a miracle. Sene rode him into the sheets while the light poured in from the stars.

“I missed you,” she whispered into his ear.

He smiled beneath her, ragged with exhaustion. It just felt good. He couldn’t muster anything but to hang onto her body for dear life. She had all the energy that night, and he was just her workhorse, finally crashing from three weeks on the road and the bone-sucking fight of the Darvaarad and the fifteen mile walk from the sea. He pressed her hips downward, pulled himself deeper, heard her squeak, grinned, kissed her eyes and told her he couldn’t last. So she breathed, and she slowed down and eased off of him. She finished him quickly with her hand until he was moaning. She watched him as he came, tugging him through, and she was filled with possession and responsibility. He was hers to love. She took him onto her tongue toward the end, kissing the very tip. She couldn’t help it. He shivered a little—aching, sensitive, but he didn’t stop her. She cleaned him up with her mouth. The world got quiet and driftless in his wake. Once he had fallen completely still, she laid her head on his chest for just a second. Rising, falling. She closed her eyes.

The house was warm that night, like all the friendship and happy feelings from dinner had been converted into heat. So she sat up, unlatched and pushed open the window. The air gulped in, refreshing and cool. Solas had lulled his head over to the side, his hand resting on his forehead in perfect repose.

She sat now, naked, with her chin resting on her tall, freckled knee, looking at the moon. It was full up there, peppering. All the fireflies had gone to sleep. He reached up to push the hair out of her face. She gave him a big grin over her shoulder.

“Sleep,” he said.

“I have to pee,” she said.

He groaned. “You always have to pee. Just pee in here.”

“Where?” she said, laughing. “On you? I suppose you are my territory.”

“Just don’t go.”

She held him by the ear and kissed him on the eyebrow. “I gotta,” she said.

She got off the bed and threw on a shirt. This one was clean and new, but still big. He rolled over in the sheets to look at her, sweat at his temples. “If you stay,” he said. “I’ll make you a rainbow.” He smirked, lazy.

She pinched his cheek. “You’re supposed to be a huge, terrifying elven warrior,” she said. “Look at you now. Just a big, sleepy puppy.”

"I am not a puppy. I am a huge, terrifying elven warrior.”

“Yes, with your rainbows and your butterflies.” She kissed him one more time. “I’ll be back.”

“No.”

“I promise,” she said.

He smiled at her. He was drifting anyway. He was halfway gone to sleep already, so she turned down the lantern just a little.

“ _Ara vhenan,_ ” she heard him say as he closed his eyes.

“ _Ara vhenan,_ ” she said. And then she went into the hallway and closed the door behind her.

 

In the bathroom, she sat on a porcelain seat. The toilet here had a flushing mechanism that scared the shit out of her. It made a loud noise, so she just left it. She’d heard Bull snoring from somewhere down the hall, and she didn’t want to disturb anyone. She rinsed her hands and dried them and looked into the mirror. The room smelled like basil. She smoothed her hair. In the morning, she would take a bath in the tub and fill it with lavender bubbles. The tub was also made of porcelain, and it had a drain and a faucet like the sink downstairs. She thought, _One day, I will be used to this._

When she finished, she went back to the hallway. She thought she’d heard laughing from somewhere. She peaked in on Solas who had not moved. His breathing had deepened and grown steady, and he was so sweet there. A big man all tucked safely into his nest. She left him. She wasn’t tired just yet. She went back down the hall, and as she descended the narrow little staircase, she began to hear wind chimes. Those of the likes she’d never heard before. The music was new. The first floor was quiet, but it was not dark. She didn’t hear any noise from the kitchen, but there was a door half-way open to the side of the kitchen. There were lanterns lit here and there and a few fiery butterflies leftover from dinner, perching on a dahlia set in water at the center of the table. Everything was very clean. After dinner, Bull had done the dishes, with help from Thom while Dorian dried them. She and Solas had put them away. Sera and Cassandra, who’d done most of the cooking had sat in the living room, playing cards with Lea.

Mythal wiped down the table and swept the floors and then sat, watching the card game for a while, sipping a bit of brandy. They’d all gotten tipsy, and after he finished with the dishes, Dorian brought out more wine, and Thom stoked the fire. Sene and Solas retired first. They still had not told anyone about the engagement.

Sene followed the music of the wind chimes through the living room and to the sunroom. She had not come in here the day before. It was low and orange-lit, with these strange hanging lanterns. They were all very different, complex, geometric shapes—tangles of glass and metal and wire—like something Solas might have made. They were filled with what appeared to be a typical lamplight. The bookshelves were crawling with these delicate green vines, little white flowers, like the eluvian in the Korcari Wilds. Like they had been claimed by the earth. Some of the books she earnestly recognized from Solas’s old house in the Fade, and this made the hair on her arms stand up and a shiver run through her spine. Everything in this room was well-used but tidy. The floors were a shiny, honey wood. The wind chimes that had drawn her here were made of little bones and pieces of coral, sea shells, shiny blue metal bent to all shapes. The music they made was continuous, like some sort of metaphysical being. Sene still wondered about the well in the valley below. What it was, how it worked. Everybody else seemed to just accept that it was magic, and magic was weird, but Sene knew that there was something deeper going on with that thing. It wasn’t _just magic._ It was a big magic. It was old.

She stopped at one of the windows. It went all the way up to the ceiling and all the way down to her shins. It was propped open, and the wind chimes were sweetly bumping into one another with the breeze. She touched them, dragged her fingers past the bones and the coral and the shells and the metal shapes. When she did this, the music got louder. Like it knew her. This was neat. She did it again.

At some point, she heard a creak in the floorboards behind her. She glanced over her shoulder. It was Lea.

“The house is warming to you,” she said.

Sene felt like a little kid. Caught in the act. She turned around and held her hands behind her back. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just—they’re so lovely.”

“Don’t be sorry,” said Lea. She wore a white apron all covered in clay. She was drying her hands on a towel and had her black hair tied back in a loose bun. She came over, stood by Sene’s side. Sene turned to face the window again. Lea tossed the towel, held out her hand. “May I?” she said.

Sene nodded. Lea picked up Sene’s hand, guided it until, together, they touched one of the little bone chimes. Once again, the song grew. It swelled, even bigger this time. It was a smiling sound, or that’s what Cole would have called it.

“How does it do that?” said Sene.

“They recognize you,” said Lea. She let go of Sene’s hand.

Sene blushed. “I would have found you,” she said. “I didn’t know you’d be awake.”

“I keep odd hours,” said Lea. “I was just outside, catching up on my watering. Plus, I’ve noticed that the pottery wheel, at night, yields a far more…robust product. I don’t know why. It likes the stars.” She smirked. It was a canny statement, like she was testing the waters. How much Sene was willing to believe. A very _Solas_ thing to do.

Sene smiled at this, studying. “Your pottery wheel likes the stars?” she said.

Lea shrugged. “I guess so.”

“I’ve never used a pottery wheel,” said Sene. “I know that must seem crazy to some people.”

“The way I hear it,” said Lea, “you grew up in the sort of place where somebody else probably made the pottery for you. This, I understand well. I never once even saw a pottery wheel until I married Solas’s father. I was eighteen when I taught myself.”

“You’re right,” said Sene. “Mostly. Though my mother had a pottery wheel. She was not from a wealthy clan.”

Lea sighed, glanced up to Sene, mysterious and pretty and intrigued. Sene was trying to find Solas in there, in her face, but the harder she looked, the more dreamy she became.

“Would you like to try it?” said Lea.

“Try what?” said Sene.

“The pottery wheel. It’s in the room next to the kitchen.”

“Oh.” Sene fluffed her hair. A nervous compulsion, but she was very excited. “Yes, I would.”

 

Solas had fallen asleep. At some point, he thought he’d felt wings beating in his face. He ignored it, went back to dreaming, but the sensation returned. The third time, he awoke. He sat straight up in bed, swatting at a flock of invisible birds in the air. When he realized what was happening, he looked around, alarmed.

“Mythal?” he said.

There was no answer. The room was empty. Sene was not there. The experience had been so jarring, even just that particular taste of Mythal’s name in his mouth, how he’d said it—it made him panic. Wings beating in his face. She’d used to do that to call out to him. He had forgotten. Before, it had been a comforting gesture between them. She’d use it whenever they were apart. Now, it startled him awake. He looked out the window, his heart big and thumping in his chest. The yard was empty but for the moonlight, so he tried to remember what Thom had said a couple days before in the garden about breathing.

He couldn’t tell how much time had passed since he’d fallen asleep. Sometimes, he was still forced to reckon with everything bad that had ever happened to him, and it messed with his mind. It didn’t matter how happy he was, or how safe or how brave. This was the price of remembering. He put his feet on the floor, listened to his conscience. _You’re fine,_ it said, in Dorian’s voice, no less. _Your melon is intact._ He took some more deep breaths, dug his fists into his eyes. Then he threw on a pair of soft linen slacks, and he tied them loosely at the waist, and he went, shirtless, into the halls of the treehouse, looking for Sene.

He wandered the second floor first, poked his head into the bathroom. There was a single candle lit on the window sill, but she was not there. Back in the hallway, he could hear Bull snoring through one of the closed doors, a bit of hushed talking in one of the rooms down the hall. This was oddly reassuring, other people awake in the night. By the moon, he guessed that it was nearly one o’clock. Once he got downstairs, he heard earnest, loud laughter.

He followed the sound, past the sunroom to the kitchen, and behind a half-closed pink door. He pushed it open, and there, he saw her—Sene—sitting at the pottery wheel. His mother was there, too, a blue towel thrown over her shoulder. She helped Sene lift some little clay piece off the spinner. Together, they marveled.

“You’re a natural,” said Lea.

“Not really,” said Sene.

Solas cleared his throat.

They both turned to look. He smiled.

Sene got up from the stool the moment she saw him. She came right over, and she was so bright and tall. So pretty, and she still smelled a little like their sex and like sweat and he could still sort of feel her on him, sticking and warm. This, her there, now, in front of him, it woke him right the fuck up. “Look, vhenan,” she said, holding out a handful of clay in the shape of a cup. “I made you a pottery.”

Lea laughed into her hand.

Solas took the mound of clay without question, held it up to the light, studied its shape and striations. “It’s very good, vhenan,” he said. Then, he looked at her. “Thank you.”

“I’ll put it in the kiln tonight,” said Lea. “Here.”

Solas traded her—the cup for the towel. He wiped off his hands. Then he tugged Sene by the hair and kissed her on the forehead. “I thought you were coming back,” he said.

“I got distracted,” said Sene.

“We would have invited you,” said Lea. “We thought you could use your sleep.”

“That’s all right,” said Solas. The two of them together, it was medicinal. “How long do you plan to be up?”

“Go on,” said Lea to Sene. “We’re through here. There is more pottery to made in the morning. Or, perhaps another game of cards instead. Has Solas taught you to play Diamond Back?”

“Yes,” said Sene. “Or, actually, no. Thom taught me Diamond Back. Solas played stupid at first. He let Thom teach _him,_ too _._ I don’t know if anyone’s been able to beat him.”

Solas smirked.

“You will beat him,” said Lea. “One day. Trust me. It’s just a matter of learning his tells.”

Sene blushed. She kissed Solas on the cheek. “I’ll be upstairs,” she said. “Goodnight, Lea.”

Lea nodded. “Goodnight, sweetheart.”

“I’ll be up soon,” said Solas.

“Take your time," said Sene.

Once she was gone, Solas heaved into a sigh. He leaned in the doorway with his hands in his pockets, still tired, but alert.

“She’s terrific,” said Lea, a little flushed. The room was warm. “Truly, Solas.”

“I asked her to marry me,” he said. The candles flickered on the wall—they were natural that night. “Today, before dinner. It was spontaneous, but it was right. She said yes.”

Lea, overcome, wrung the towel in her hands. “Oh, vhenan,” she said. There were tears in her eyes. “It is about time.”

He put his arm around her, kissed her quiet on the hair. She sighed and sucked it all in. “Did you already know?” he said.

“I read it off Sene the moment we sat down for dinner,” she said, sniffling a little. “She is an open window. She just lets you right in, doesn’t she?”

“Yes,” he said. “She always has. We were friends first, for several months in the beginning. Even then, she always let me in.”

“And how long did it take for you to let her in?” said Lea.

Solas sighed, hugged her close in earnest. “In some ways, not long at all,” he said. “In others, a very long time.”

They parted. Lea dried her cheeks and picked up the tray of wet clay pieces. There was Sene’s cup, plus two very lumpy bowls. “Her patience is hidden, but it is there.”

“I am privy to her patience, trust me.”

“Why haven’t you told the others?”

“We wanted to tell everyone at dinner,” said Solas, “but Sene would not blindside Mythal. There was no time to prepare.”

Lea smiled at this, inward. “Of course,” she said. “That is thoughtful. You should know that Mythal will be happy for you, Solas. I know she will, even if it takes some time. She loves you.”

“I know,” said Solas.

Together they went to the kitchen. She opened up the kiln. It was a small box built right into the wall, very hot.

He wondered then, about the wings. “Is she still awake?” he said. “Mythal?”

“She’s in the garden,” said Lea.

“What is she doing?”

Lea closed the kiln, dusted her hands off on her skirt. “She is saying goodbye, I believe. To her magic.” Then, she looked up at Solas, very serious.

 

Outside, in the moonlit garden, Mythal stood in the blue grass, staring up at the branches of a very tall tree. The trunk was knotty and meaty with huge, wet leaves, and she could hear its great heart pulsing from within. The roots were deep. They went all the way to the center of the earth. Or, at least it felt like they did.

She reached forward and touched the tree, once. When she did, the whole thing glowed silver, and it thanked her. _Thank you,_ it seemed to say. She smiled. She sat down and touched the roots, and it did the same thing again. She picked a blade of grass and peeled it to ribbons. She was tired, but she felt free. Days gone by like a million echoes subsided in her conscience. At dinner, Bull had pulled a coin from behind her ear using sleight of hand, and she had seen this sort of thing a million times before, but it enchanted her, that he had thought to include her in his silly magic.

She heard Solas enter through the gate not long after. His footsteps. He hesitated. She could sense him, looking up at the tree, and then he came and sat down beside her. With his elbows resting on his knees, he looked at Mythal. “Where did the tree come from?” he said.

She searched his face for the thing she recognized. “It is a byproduct,” she said. “The purification ritual has begun.”

He smoothed his hand over one of the roots. The tree flickered, a low green, but it did not glow. “Mythal,” he said.

“I know what you’ve come here to tell me,” she said, making the tree turn silver, making it hum. It reassured her. “About you and Sene. That you’re getting married. I’ve known since dinner. I appreciate your wanting to tell me in confidence, Solas, but you don’t have to hide it any longer. You know how I feel. She knows as well. I am not here to come between you. I swear I never was.”

Solas nodded, sighed. He did not seem surprised, just heavy with meaning. “Sene just thought—she was worried about you.”

“Of course she was,” said Mythal. “A perfect woman.”

He shook his head. “Don’t do that.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know. She is not perfect, and neither am I. I’m trying to change.”

“I worry about you, too, Mythal,” said Solas. He sounded eager. She looked at him. “I worry about you. I think about what happened. It's still in me. It fucks with my head, Mythal. I have not forgotten."

Mythal blinked. He was direct, handsome. He was far away, like a man at sea."You think I want that?" she said.

"No." He looked at her like he needed her, but this was an illusion. His way of making her listen. "I just needed you to know."

She became wistful. She stared, hard into his eyes. Familiar windows, gray and quiet, and if she listened very closely, she could still hear their love, whispering to her through the ages. It was the color of that tree when she touched it. Silver and pure but getting fainter with each passing moment. She could have held onto that whisper forever. Even if it killed her. But she also knew then that she no longer wanted to die. "We broke," she said. "But I would do it all the same, if given the chance." She looked away. 

He nodded. "As would I."        

They turned their attention back to the tree.

“How does she do this?” he said.

Mythal sighed. She blinked. The tears always surprised her in this world. “All she did was plant your orb in the earth, Solas, and from it grew this tree.” She looked at him, cautious. “The power will be heavy at first. You know that.”

“I know.”

“There will be no time to waver. Once the magic is pure, that orb will become the most dangerous artifact on the face of the earth. Unless you want another breach on your hands, you must use it, immediately.”

“I know.”

“Are you afraid?”

The sounds of the crickets went off and up. The tree was more silver than before. He shook his head slowly. “No,” he said. “I am thankful.”

Together they watched the tree, pulsing, its silver soul lifting into the sky.

 

Bull roused from sleep. He had very good hearing. He thought he heard talking. First inside, then outside. He sat up in the bed, pulled back the curtain and cracked the window anyway. Outside, in the garden, he saw Solas and Mythal. They were sitting beside one another at the foot of a huge, silver tree. But that tree had not been there before, and this startled the shit out of him. He should have known there was something fucked up going on.

“Kadan,” he said, shaking Dorian lightly by the shoulders. Then harder. “Kadan.”

“What? What is it?” said Dorian. He sat up, reached for his staff on instinct. But Bull eased his grip, tossed the staff to the floor. “Bull? What’s the matter? Is there someone here?”

“No,” said Bull. “But there’s a fucking huge, magical tree in the garden.”

“A _fucking huge magical tree?_ ” said Dorian. He scrubbed at the stubble on his cheeks, snapped his fingers so that the lantern on the nightstand filled with fire. “What on Andraste’s green earth are you talking about?”

“Look,” said Bull. He pulled back the curtains further so that Dorian could see.

Dorian leaned forward, shirtless in the moonlight. He squinted down at the fucking huge magical tree in the garden.

“Sweet Maker,” said Dorian. “You’re right.”

"Yeah, no shit.”

“Is that Solas and Mythal?”

“Uh-huh. Crazy town, party of two.”

“This is about the orb,” said Dorian, shaking his head. “Solas mentioned it briefly before dinner. I don’t know everything, and so I’m certainly not going to bore you with the details. Just trust me when I say that it’s okay.” He kissed Bull on the horns and laid back down, his head on the pillow. “Solas’s mother is some kind of serious witch, Bull. He once told me that she could grow huge, living trees overnight. It’s just magic.”

Bull grunted, still uneasy. He pulled the curtain shut. “Leave the lamp on for a little while,” he said.

Dorian smiled with his eyes closed.

Bull sat with his knees pulled up in the bed, looking out the window at Solas and Mythal. It was weird, how they operated. How they sort of had to. It’s not like they could just say fuck you, goodbye. The world suddenly felt very big and he felt very small. He looked at Dorian.

“Hey, kadan,” he said. He leaned back against the headboard. “Are you sleeping?”

Dorian shook his head. “What is it, amatus?”

“When we leave here,” said Bull, scratching at his horns, “what do you want to do? I mean, where do you want to go?”

Dorian opened his eyes, turned his head to look at him. “I imagine Sene will want us all to return to Skyhold. Don’t you?”

“Yeah, at first,” said Bull. “Of course. We gotta debrief and…debrief. But the way I see it, with Corypheus and the Viddasala in the can, we’re all due for some heavy R&R. I’m pretty sure Thom and Josie are talking about going to Antiva City.”

“Well, that sounds fruitful,” said Dorian. “Perhaps they’ll get married. Have a great many bearded sons.”

“I’m serious, kadan,” said Bull. “Quit kidding around.”

“I’m not kidding.”

Bull got down into the bed, on his side so he could take Dorian’s hand and gather it up inside his fists. “I love you, Dorian. I’m ready to do this.”

Dorian seemed surprised. Bull liked outpourings, but this was different. “I love you, too,” he said. “But as far as I’m concerned, we _are_ doing this. I’m not going anywhere.”

“You’re not gonna leave me behind, are you? Off to Tevinter to save the world?”

Softening, Dorian opened up to him. He smiled, shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’ll never wash my hands of Tevinter, Bull, but I need time to…process everything I’ve learned in the past six months, about who I am. My best friends are elves. I’ve been fighting side by side with elves for more than a year. Not to mention _you._ I’ll not go back to that place until I can institute some sort of true, conceivable change.”

“What about the meantime?” said Bull.

Dorian kissed his knuckles, took a deep breath, wanting Bull to relax. “In the meantime, we see the Inquisition through to its bones,” he said. “We help Sene and Solas. We live our lives. We can go to Antiva City. We can go anywhere. But I’m not prepared to return to Tevinter. Not yet, Bull. I can’t. If my mother would truly like to meet you, then she can prove it and meet us halfway. Does that sound all right to you?”

Bull smiled, stretched out, welcomed Dorian’s head onto his chest. He was a complex creature who desired to be simple. He wanted roots. He wanted punching things, and he wanted Dorian. Maybe a piano, someday. In any case, it seemed that, for the time being, he had it all. “Sounds good, kadan,” he said. “Thanks for listening.”

“Anytime, amatus.”

 

“And that,” said Cassandra, holding the candle beneath her chin—it cast an eerie glow on her cheeks, “is the story of the ghost that haunts the kitchens at Caer Bronach. We would all be wise never to leave cheese in the grater, nor water in the kettle. The end.”

Thom laughed. Cassandra passed him the bottle. He took a long drink. “Very good, Seeker,” he said. “Didn’t you know you had it in you.”

“Every once in a while I surprise myself,” said Cassandra, “and others for that matter.”

“Shite,” said Sera, all shrieky, hugging a huge, soft pillow to her chest. She had bitten her fingernails down to nothing. “Why’d you do that? We’ve _been_ there. Ruddy Crestwood. Why’s it always got to be Crestwood?”

“Here,” said Thom, passing her the bottle. “Have a drink. You’ll be fine.”

“Don’t want a drink,” said Sera. “Want to unhear.”

Cassandra smiled, sly, and set the candle down on the bedside table. Thom had a huge bed. They were all piled on top of it. They’d wanted to keep drinking after the night went south.

“You’re afraid of too much,” said Cassandra. “But I’ve seen you cut down more than your fair share of demons and enemy mages, Sera. Sometimes, I think you must be faking it.”           

“Don’t test me. It’s different when I’m on a roll. When there’s daggers. And arrows. And…arrows.” She clamped her arms over her chest, closed her eyes real tight. “Ruddy ghosts. Fucking ghosts. Can't get stabby with ghosts."

“When I was a boy,” said Thom, “I remember I was afraid of storm fronts.”

“Storm fronts?” said Sera. “What the hell?”

“Like long parades of clouds,” said Cassandra, swinging her legs behind her, lying on her stomach. “Bringing a change to the weather.”

“Exactly,” said Thom.

“What’s to fear there?” said Sera. “Not ghosts, just rain.”

“It was never _just rain,_ Sera _,_ ” said Thom. He pushed open the window, started rolling a joint on the sill. The moonlight poured in like snow. “It was anvils. These huge clouds that knit the sky to blackness. They’d make the heavens shake. Lightning, thunder. Sometimes, they’d bring tornadoes, rip the cellar doors clean off their hinges.”

“Fucking tits,” said Sera. “Is this a bedtime story?"

“Just listen," said Thom, sealing the joint with his tongue. He admired his handiwork. “No matter how much I hated it, how much it messed with my head, made me fearful. No matter what it destroyed, the stormy season always passed. Most fear is born of the unknown, Sera. As I got older, I gained perspective. I knew what to expect. I tightened the hinges on the cellar doors, helped my father reinforce them with steel plates. I learned.” He lit the joint with the candle, took a hit, blew the smoke out the window to the nighttime air. "We all learn."

“I guess," said Sera. "Learning is good."

“Andraste’s blessed tits,” said Thom then, dazed off his ass. “This is some strong shit.”

Sera plucked the joint from his fingers, examined it at the lit end. “Where the blimey fuck did you get this anyway?”

“Lea,” said Thom, blowing the smoke through his nose. “She’s got a little plot out back. Said she uses it for _medicinal purposes._ ”

“My arse,” said Sera. She took a long hit, exhaled. She passed the joint to Cassandra, and then she closed her eyes. “There are ghosts everywhere,” she said. “Makes me shiver. For real. No ghost season, just ghosts. There are ghosts here. I can feel them.”

“In the treehouse?” said Cassandra. She looked at the joint. She took a hit. She hadn’t taken a hit off a joint in a long time. Cassandra alternately felt very old and very young. She could barely tell where she stood anymore. But Thom had her by at least a couple years, and here he was, just a man. Some part of her did not want to return to Skyhold. Some part of her did not want to be the Divine. But nothing was perfect, and nothing’s a mystery. There are downfalls everywhere and a million different ways and reasons to love in this world.

“This is a ghost house,” said Sera, tripping. Her eyes were glazed off. Thom smoked and settled his back against the headboard. He felt like he was floating underwater. “Right? I can _feel_ it. It's good, but it's ghosty. Something old, something new.”

“Something borrowed, something blue?” said Thom. He peaked out of one eye. They all looked at each other and started laughing. Who had the joint, anyway?

“What the shite?” said Sera.

“I’m not sure whether to laugh or hit you,” said Cassandra.

Thom chuckled. “I just want to sleep,” he said.

“Me, too,” said Sera.

“What a week,” said Cassandra.

They were all lying on their backs by now, counting the near-invisible flowers inlaid on the white-painted ceiling.

 

When Solas got back to the room that night, Sene was awake, sitting on the bed by a little oil lamp, reading a book. She smiled when he came in, closed the book in her lap and showed him the cover.

“ _Fresh Flower Love Spells,_ ” said Solas. “Very interesting.”

“I’m learning about the nasturtium,” she said.

“And?” he said.

“It’s for healing,” she said. “You can eat the flowers whole. Isn’t that weird?”

"Not really," he said. He got right into bed with her, tossed the book to the floor. "I eat flowers all the time." He smirked.

But then, she became alert. She sat straight up, like she’d heard something.

“What’s the matter, vhenan?” he said.

“Nothing,” she said. “Just—is there a storm?”

He drew quiet, his hand around her knee. They both listened. Sene tilted her head toward the window. But it was a nighttime nothing. It was only winter crickets. “I don’t hear anything,” he said. “Come here.”

“Hm." She fit her body against his under the covers. “I thought I heard thunder.”

“It’s a big, vast terrain out here, vhenan,” said Solas, kissing her neck. “All kinds of wild magic and noises. It’ll play tricks on you, if you let it.”

She was so warm in there. She was like fire.

“Are you sure?" she said.

"I'm sure," he said.

She sighed. She smiled very big and closed her eyes. "Goodnight, Solas,” she said.

He curled around her like she was a holy vessel. “Goodnight, Sene.”

He snapped his fingers once, and then the candle went dark.


	54. Astronomy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No real god need prove himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _cw: blood imagery_

Many years ago.

On an impulse, she snuck out the window. It was very high, but she was good at spinning rope, and it was like a fairy tale. Powerful young woman trapped in a tower in the stars. _Fuck this fuck this,_ she would scribble in her notebooks in red ink. She planted black flowers from every corner of the room like a symbol and hid notes for the maids in their hearty centers: _If you help me escape from this castle, I will give you 50 pounds of gold. I am good for the money. L._ She was not lying. She was good for the money. She was sixteen years old in her enchanted life as some high heiress of Arlathan. According to her parents, she was a future queen, but Lea just wanted to spin her rope out of acorns and roots she knew how to coax from thin air. She was unafraid of her magic back then. She loved it. She wore it like feathers that weren't too heavy yet. And yet, all she wanted was to hike up her dress and climb down that rope ladder to the field below. She wanted to climb all the way to the bottom, put her hood up and leave the estate and meet a boy somewhere deep in that glowing city of bright, magical batteries.

So that is exactly what she did.

Lea had a boy. That was not the issue. She had met him not two weeks before. He was the architect’s son, and he did his own architecting as well. He had been coming over to do some work on the aviary. Lea detested the aviary, but she followed him in there anyway, and once a bird even came and pooped on her head. It was a tragedy, but after the initial fuss, she didn’t care. He laughed when it happened. He helped her wash it out with a clean towel he drew from his back pocket. _It’s good luck,_ he said. She believed him. He had been working with wood, and he smelled of sawdust and plants. He had hands as big as stars, she remembered. As big as stars. He was seventeen years old with a bald head and a kind disposition. She wanted to marry him that day, that day he helped her wash the bird poop out of her hair. She was not much of a romantic. She just knew what she wanted. And she could not stop sighing. She thought she might sigh for 100 years straight.

So that night, she went to the city. Rules be damned. He had told her the place he liked to hang out. _It’s nothing savage,_ he said to her, chewing on a toothpick, almost like an apology. He sometimes treated her like she was a kitten, something that needed to be held and humored. He came to their castle every other day to work on the aviary. They were building a fountain at the center of the room, one by his own design. He was very good with tools and things, and this is not something that, as a debutante of Arlathan, you got to see too often. The men of Arlathan were soft, she thought. They all had soft hands. They conjured their whiskey in silver goblets to waste their magic. But the country men, they brewed the liquor themselves and distilled it in oak barrels. They knew how to build fountains from the stone of the earth.

His name was Marin. And he was seventeen, and he lived outside the city in a suburban meadow pretty place called the Weathers. He was the son of an architect, and he was going to be his own architect someday, and she was gong to marry him. She did not care who told her what. She was going to marry this fine, tall, handsome architect from a pretty meadow place outside the city and whoever tried to stop her could kiss her ass and eat shit to high heaven, because she was going to marry him. She was going to marry him, she swore to all the gods, real or invented, she was going to marry him, so there.

She shimmied to the bottom of the castle on her homespun rope ladder. It took her near an hour. The castles of Arlathan were tall, as you can probably imagine, but Leanathy was teensy and spry, and she knew a thing or two about climbing. Their castle was built at the top of a very high hill. Once her feet hit the grass she fell to her knees and kissed the soil till she could taste it. She was free. She was free. She put up her hood, and she remembered what Marin had said last time he saw her.   _It’s nothing savage._ Meaning: it was not one of those gin joints with cards and girls. It was just a pub, maybe minor gambling but nothing worth bloody knuckles. He probably did not expect her to come herself on a night like tonight, hooded and hiding her noble face from the world, but she was a princess in some peoples’ eyes, and she was on the lam.

This is a familiar story, if you haven’t noticed by now, but Leanathy didn’t care. She was saying fuck the stories. Fuck the stories. I want to live.

She hustled seventeen huge blocks to the nearest train station. The hefty monster roared up, steam going one thousand feet into the stars. She got on the train with the rest of the people, and she took down her hood and pretended to belong so hard that, after a while, she actually felt the part. She _did_ belong. Nobody knew her or gave two shits about who she was. She had never been so exhilarated in all her life just to _be_ somewhere. Alone, in the city, on her way to meet a boy.

The train ride took twenty minutes, and in that time she conjured a little flower in her hand and gave it to a boy child with wide, purple eyes. _Do it again?”_ said the child, and his mother patted his head and said to Leanathy, _Those are such pretty little magics. Why, I would pay for those._ And Leanathy said, _It is no trouble, ma’am,_ and she conjured flower after flower till she had made that woman a full bouquet of red roses and orange nasturtium, and then it was her stop, and the woman was blushing, and Lea was on her way.

She got to the bar in the city in no time flat. It was a high-ceilinged place called The Window, but for a place called The Window, it actually had very few. It was dark and lit by candles. She went inside and sat down at the bar and she ordered a cocktail, maker’s choice. The bartender gave her a sly look. _You on your own tonight, gray eyes?_ he said. She shrugged her shoulders and replied, _I_ _’m always on my own._ Then, he made her a drink of gin and sweet mirthberries, and it was so delicious, like an herbal remedy, and she cherished that bartender, for he seemed to have read her mind.

Finally, at some point, she got up to walk around the bar. It was a big room with lots of candlelight and tables built right into the walls. People nodded and smiled wherever she went, and she wondered why it was so important that she be hidden from this world. People were good, she thought. People were fair. She found the love of her life in the back, playing pool with a group of men all as tall and handsome as he was. But she did not want any of them. She had made up her mind, and she stopped a little short of the table and leaned against a sturdy beam, and she said nothing, just sipped her cocktail from a clean, clear glass, enjoying life, every simmering moment, and eventually, he saw her.

His eyes got big. He was surprised. He looked around, as if worried, and then he came right over, and he put a hand on her shoulder and brought her face up close to his. _What are you doing here, Lea?_ he said. He put her hood up. She put it down again.

 _I came to see you,_ she said, _and because I just needed to get out of there. I can’t take it anymore._

He was so tall and he smelled so good. He smiled in spite of himself and kissed her right on the lips. _You shouldn’t be here,_ he said. _You shouldn’t._

But he only half-seemed to believe the words he was saying, and she was hardly listening anyway, light in the air now, going way up like a balloon. He had kissed her, just like that. He put the black hair behind her ear. She could sense his friends working hard to ignore them, but they could not ignore the part where their buddy had just kissed a girl they had never once met before. They were warm-eyed and big-hearted, she could tell. She could always tell, and this was a talent that would stick with her for the rest of her life—the ability to tell the lovers from the scorn. The beauty from the ills. All that lives and dies is born from the earth, and if there was anything that Leanathy knew, it was the earth and the magics it told.

 _Lea?_ he said. _Did you hear me?_

 _Yes,_ she said finally. _I did, and I understand, Marin. I just want to stay for a little while. I won’t get you into trouble. I swear._

And with this it seemed he could not help himself. He removed her cloak from her shoulders. He flung it over his own arm, very practiced as a true gentleman, and he held her hand and took her over and introduced her to his friends. They all shook her hand amiably.

 _So, you’re the rich girl?_ one of them said to her, raising a glass in her honor. _We’re glad to have you, Lea._

She raised her glass in return. _I’m glad to have you, too._

The boy laughed at this, and then he drank. Her cocktail was empty by now, so Marin popped the top off a little bottle of something gold and handed it to her. _I_ _t’s ale,_ he said. _You don’t have to drink it._

 _I love ale,_ said Lea, though she’d never tried it before. It tasted like barley and hops. It tasted like the earth. It tasted like the boy she had just kissed by candlelight in the deep dark and happy guts of Arlathan.

It was the best night of her life.

 

Now.

Lea woke up, thirsty. Her mouth was cotton. Her heart was big in her chest, and the room had grown purple and very quiet, and all the covers were in a pale ball on the floor. She put her face in her hands, grounded. She felt hungover. She closed her eyes and breathed.

Seeing Solas again had set her heart on a train. It was going fast in the other direction, she thought, and she now worried faithfully that he must have experienced the same exact sensation upon waking in the new world, and how he would have been alone, and how this would have destroyed him. Solas’s love had always needed an anchor, as without one, it all spread into the universe and flooded back into his soul like a hard depression. He would have suffered, cruelly, mostly at his own hand. Even as a teenager, he had been prone to dark moods. She’d rarely had to punish him for his bullshit. He always punished himself, and this was difficult to endure as he carried the guilt inside him like a death and it made him more or less lifeless for days or weeks at a time, but that was just him. That was Solas.

Somehow, however, he had managed to find lasting love along the line, and even a nest. He had succeeded in spite of himself, as he was just that charming, and for this, that he had been blessed with his father’s elegance and charm, she had always been grateful. She put her bare feet on the cold floor of the bedroom. She rolled her head around on her shoulders and reminded herself that she was not alone. Once she felt her faculties returning to her, she took a deep breath and she got up and went out to the hallway and down the stairs.

The house was quiet all around her. She slept in her master bedroom all alone on the third floor. It had rained in the night, just a restful shower that seemed to bring peace to land of dreams. The water still dripped down the windows in clear lines. The woodwork was damp. The stairs were soft. Things creaked. She made a cup of black tea once she got to the kitchen and drank it, slowly, at the table. It was strong, the leaves pruned by her own hand, and the steam was good and it cleared her head. When she finished, she put the cup in the sink, and then she threw a green, linen shall around her shoulders and she went outside to the garden to check on the progress of the orb.

Sometimes, when Lea listened very hard, she could still hear the pitter-patter of little feet in the halls in the mornings. This old property, her old feelings coming up to haunt her when she least expected it. But it was just a ghost of Solas’s childhood. It was harmless, a memory, an imprint. The little feet, the running. They’d used to have a cat named Dahn’ain _._ Dahn’ain meant _little bee,_ and Solas would chase it from the kitchen down the hall and then out his bedroom window. He did this several times a day, every day for the better part of his toddler and young childhood years. It had a big bushy tail of black and white stripes, and it liked to hop up on Marin’s shoulder in the mornings when he made breakfast. One day, Marin built a little window with a soft flap in the front door that Dahn'ain could use to come and go as he pleased. He was a soft little thing, and they’d found him as a kitten, wandering onto their property from the pasture next door. He'd been purring so hard, it was like a buzzing noise. That was the bee thing. Solas named him. Dahn'ain's coat was long and, and he was sweet, and he followed Marin everywhere. He was his faithful cat companion. But Marin had taken to calling him Etunash’ain _,_ which meant _little shit,_ because he liked to dig holes under the fence and kill mice and leave them as trophies in the garden. Sometimes, Ghil would find the trophies and magic them back to life for a few minutes, which scared the shit out of everyone except for Solas. Solas had been late to his magic, but he did not scare easy. He would watch the cat and the revival of the mice, their life and death stories, merely curious. He would count them, keep lists. He had a running tally of them all.

One morning, the spring after Marin was gone, Dahn’ain went out the little cat window in the front door and never returned. Solas searched for him, patiently, for days, though Leanathy remembered a feeling of relief at the cat's absence. When Ghil learned what had happened, she cried hysterically. Lea had to calm her with essential oils and a lot of patting on the back. Ghil held a ceremonial funeral in Dahn’ain’s honor, lighting candles in the dark of the garden, saying weird, invented prayers, while Solas just watched, as usual, silent, already practiced in his stoicism when he was only nine years old. He had just learned to make butterflies. He made one for Dahn’ain’s grave, but it only stayed for a little while, and then it faded away.

Now, in the yard, the air was cool, wet. Dahn’ain was long lost to this world, and so was Solas's childhood and her husband. There was a loon cackling somewhere off in the direction of the sea, and rabbits rooting around in the clover. The nasturtium had begun to wilt against the fence. Several deer came up from the valley below and seemed to smile at her. Sometimes, the spirits who lived there took the shapes of animals, so she always smiled back, just in case. This was a kind of worship, the kind that comes from the Fade. Sometimes, she wondered if Dahn’ain was still out there, a wandering cat ghost, in a field of cat ghosts. Elf ghosts. This was an old place. She still felt a little guilty for her relief upon that cat’s disappearance. She wondered if Solas even remembered him.

She got on her hands and knees at the foot of the great big storybook tree in the garden. It was time to feel. She put her fists in the soil. She dug, and she dug. She thought about caterpillars and sweet rot as she broke a sweat. She dug. She dug until she was leaning way forward into this hole in the ground, and that is finally when she felt it. The byproduct of her power. Its form always surprised her, but she always knew it anyway. This time, it was soft, something warm plumping up against her fingertips. It was fat, pulsating, like a bundle of capillaries, warm and squishy in the dirt, and she took a deep breath, and the world smelled like wet leaves. She could feel her own power like a sickness in her marrow, begging for release. When she could not take it anymore—like a terrible urging, she squeezed that underground mass until she felt it burst in her palms, soaking the soil, flooding her hands. A warm bleed. Whatever had built up inside of her, it was gone now. She closed her eyes, let the feeling wash through her body. Sapped, motionless, empty. In this moment, she knew she had altered the shape of the future, but, in some ways, this day had been foretold for many years, so she knew that it would be all right. It was simply a choice.

Solas was the creator here, and she had given him life. Not everyone would appreciate exactly what this meant, and neither should they, Lea believed. She sometimes still felt locked into the attitude of old nobility. Provincial and better. She did not like this about herself. She wanted the best for Solas, and now for Sene. The mother in her was still strong, stronger than the richness in her blood, and all of this she experienced in full fury as she broke the earth and felt its guts ripening in her hands, and the ritual—purifying Mythal’s magic, making it clean—it completed itself. She felt the orb filling, filling with a new liquid. It would grow heavier by the minute and be ready for him inside of one hour.

She looked up when she was finished. She felt elated, took her hands out of the soil and wiped them off on her dress. The silver storybook tree had twisted in on itself and disappeared into the air. It had never really existed at all, she thought. It had only been another byproduct, an expression of her power, just like that thing in the soil, its appearance an ever-changing illusion that, if she did not get rid of it, would have gunked her up inside.

She went back inside then, and she locked the door—a heavy, metal bolt. No cat window, no cats in this place. She tossed her shall over a chair. The room was so blue, pristine and pre-dawn, and everything hummed—the teapot, the empty cups and saucers. She was exhausted. She could feel Mythal, asleep upstairs with the white blanket tucked up beneath her chin, severed from her magic forever. Thousands of years ago, when Mythal slept, it was like a hush unleashing over the universe. Like all the storms in the stars gone quiet. Leanathy remembered. Leanathy had always admired that sort of power and how it could make electricity in the air. But now, Mythal was just a woman, thought Lea, like any other woman, and there were troubles inside her, but they were tempered and flat. They were simpler, and this meant they could be solved. Mythal was the happiest she’d ever been, she just didn’t realize it yet, and for her happiness, Lea was glad.

She lie down on the couch and put her hand over her eyes. The world was still blue here, but it all felt very bright all of a sudden. She could smell the sunrise. She felt uneven, so she took a deep gulp of air and pitched herself into the Fade.

           

“When do you think we should do it?” said Sene. They were next to each other, still in bed. It was the very early morning, but the birds were loud outside. Some sort of barn swallow. Not long before, Solas had jerked abruptly from a dream he could not remember, waking them both.

“When should we do what?” he said. He had his hands behind his head. He was staring up at the ceiling now, contemplating the nothingness inside him. He did not like to forget his dreams. It had been something with the earth. He was standing over a huge pit in the earth, looking down at some wet, ripe bounty that lie within. It beckoned, made genuine promises. That's all he could recall.

“When should we get married?” said Sene.

This snapped him out of it. He turned his head to look at her. Her hair was tangly and everywhere. He smiled. “That depends, vhenan,” he said. “When would you like to get married?”

“Today,” she said.

He raised his eyebrows. “Today?”

“Sure,” said Sene. “Cassandra can do it. She’s almost Divine.”

With this, he almost laughed. “Even if either one of us was remotely Andrastian, Sene, we cannot get married today.”

“Why not?”

“I haven’t met your family,” he said, “your clan. We need to do this right.”

“I guess.”

He stared at her now, deep. An old focus like from the very beginning. “Sene,” he said.

“Yes, Solas?”

“I don’t want to rush things.” He reached to tuck the hair behind her ear. “I’m very serious. I am not a man who rushes, especially not with you. You know that.”

She seemed confused. “But why?” she said. “Is it because I’m younger?”

He shook his head, perplexed. “No,” he said. “That is not it.”

“Because I am,” she said.

“I am aware of your age, vhenan.”

“We’ve never really talked about it,” she said, pressing her thumb to the center of her palm.

“Sure we have.”

“Not like this,” she said. “Does it worry you?”

He shifted beneath the sheets, turned toward her. He held her chin in his hand, studied her. Again, he shook his head. “No,” he said. “It did worry me, in the very beginning, if we’re being honest. But certainly not anymore.”

"How did it worry you?”

“Because,” he said. “Sene, I liked you right away. That very first day. Do you remember? After the rift, you ran away and I followed you down to the frozen river.”

She smiled. “I was freaked out.”

“I know,” he said. “But when I came after you, you didn’t look at me like you were freaked out. You looked at me like you knew me, and that freaked me out.”

She nodded. “I thought you were too tall,” she said. She had picked up his hand, began to study his knuckles.

“ _Too_ tall?” he said.

“And very sure of yourself for some magic elf, but you were nice. You seemed to know what to do.”

“I liked you right away,” he went on.

“You said that already. I liked you, too.”

“But time passed, Sene.”

“And?”

“And,” he said, “I got to know you, and you let me in. I read you like a book. You were nineteen. Nineteen. I was worried. For many reasons—the fate of all Thedas was in your hands, vhenan. A nineteen-year-old Dalish elf from a family of farmers to the north. No matter how prominent the Lavellans are, the situation was dire. And I liked you. You were the first woman I’d liked in…a very long time. And yet, it was so simple. So fast. I was certain it was a mistake. I knew that I had lost my mind, in any case. I felt like I was starting over from scratch. My memory, my understanding of who I was or what I wanted, it was all mixed up, whole parts of it missing. So I thought: I will wait and see about this pretty girl named Sene.”

She blushed. “Pretty, huh?”

“Yes,” he said. “So, I waited. I was patient. I watched you, helped you. I made you come to me. I needed to be sure. But you always came, Sene. You seem to think you’re impatient, and maybe you are on the surface, or definitely in a fight, but you were patient in Haven. I saw you, making these difficult decisions, listening to Cullen, to Josephine and Leliana. Listening to me, to Cassandra. Unafraid to learn. Eager, even though you were afraid. Doing your best, and winning. You were nineteen. And at some point, I remembered that when I was nineteen, I was not so different. I was ripped out of my home, everything I knew, the life I understood, it was gone. I was forced to grapple with circumstances that I could never have prepared for, regardless of age. And none of my burden at the age of nineteen did I bear so gracefully as you bore yours.”

She was staring at him, very serious as he lie there, shirtless and validating her, piece by piece. She took both his hands into hers—big, rough hands, and she remembered him, on that first day, down by the frozen river, how he had called her _lethal’lan_. “Thanks,” she said, all full up inside. “That means a lot, Solas.”

“As it should,” he said.

“So, how long?” she said. “How long do you want to wait?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “A year?”

“A whole year?” said Sene.

“A year is not that long,” said Solas.

“Maybe not to you. You’re ancient.”

He smirked. “It is not that long, vhenan. One year will give us enough time to see to the Inquisition, the Veil, and the rather delicate situation pertaining to your clan. We can find a place to live, to normalize. Let’s do it next summer, when the weather is warm. Your family of booze elves will be sure to love me by then.”

She sighed, and then she kissed him. “Fine,” she said, smiling. “Next summer. You’ve convinced me.”

“That’s it?” he said. “That’s all it takes.”

“That’s it.”

“You’re very easy.”

“Shh,” she said. “Only with you.” She pushed some of the hair out of her face. She was happy for an instant, but this kind of talk, about Haven, it made her remember things. She got quiet.

“What’s the matter, vhenan?” said Solas.

“It’s just Haven,” she said. She shook her head.

He felt her pain immediately. He kissed her on the forehead. “You’ve saved many lives, Sene. Do not forget that.”

She felt the tears like a stupid reminder. Hot on her cheeks. She sniffled and sucked them back as best she could. “Okay.”

But then, there was a quick knock on the door. It was jarring. They both turned to see.

“Who is it?” said Solas.

“It’s me.” It was Dorian. “Are you decent?”

He’d sounded concerned. Solas looked at Sene. She shifted around a little, tucked the covers up under her freckled arms and nodded, once. They both sat up and leaned against the bed frame.

“More or less,” said Solas. “Come in.”

Dorian opened the door, just a crack. He was hesitant.

Sene sighed. “Dorian, it’s fine,” she said.

So, he came in. He looked groggy and rumpled. He was shirtless, slid into the room, closed the door behind him. He averted his eyes at first, but the moment he looked up and saw them, he froze. He became alert. “Something’s different,” he said, studying them closely. He stared at Sene for exactly five seconds. “Are you engaged?”

“What the fuck?” said Sene.

Solas smirked.

Dorian softened. “By the Maker,” he said. "The two tallest elves in Thedas finally tying the knot. That is very good news. I'll be Best Man, I assume?"

“We are not the two tallest elves in Thedas,” said Solas.

"Congratulations are in order, in any case."

"Thank you, Tevinter."

“Can all mages read minds?” said Sene, still incredulous.

“Only the ones we like,” said Dorian. He was overwhelmed with happiness, but then he sighed, and became very serious again. He looked at Solas.

"What's the matter?" said Solas.

"Your mother is asking for you."

“My mother?”

“I felt a shift in the Veil while I slept," said Dorian, running a hand through his hair. "Something to do with you. I went downstairs for some water, and your mother, she just—she did not seem well."

"Not well?" said Sene. She looked at Solas. He was very still, looking somewhere past Dorian. Far away, into the past.

 

Lea held her round stomach in the warm light.

 _Are you sure, vhenan?_ he said.

Marin stood beside her on the seashore. They were married now, and it was late autumn. He placed his huge hands over hers, big as stars. He was so tall. She took comfort in his heavy touch. What is the use of living if we cannot revisit the ghosts who made it possible to live in the first place? It was not a year after that night in the bar in the city, when he’d held her hand and introduced her to his friends. It had happened so fast. They’d fallen in love, left Arlathan when her parents would not approve, and they got married on the beach by a round ship captain named Adahl. She was pregnant inside a month.

 _I'm sure,_ she said, smiling. _It's a boy. I can feel it._

This made him very happy. They were so intensely alone here. There could have been people on all sides of them, and still, they would have been alone. Just her and him and their stupid memories.

 _Solas,_ Marin said.

 _Pride?_ she said.

 _That is the new dialect._ He put the hair behind her ear. _The way my grandfather told it, Solas means wisdom._

 _Is your grandfather still alive?_ said Lea. _Can I meet him?_   She was still learning bits and pieces about his life. He was a tall drink of water and a dreamy mystery. The waves were nipping at her ankles, making her chilly.

He sensed this. He put his arm around her, and she melted, and they turned to watch the old redtails diving into the sea. _He died two years ago._

_What did he do?_

_He was a physicist,_ said Marin. _He did work for the college._ That is when he looked around. He got big and puffed up like a good man, and he said, very proudly, _Vhenan, I am going to build a treehouse._

This made her laugh. It seemed so silly. They went for a walk along the shapes of the seashells, the cold water stinging their skin, bringing them home.

When she opened her eyes, for real this time, she thought she saw him standing over her. She could have wept and laughed all at once. But it was not him. It was Solas, and his tall wife-to-be holding his hand, standing a little bit behind him, as they watched her in dire concern. So she sat up and rubbed her hands up and down her cheeks and blinked.

"What's going on?” he said.

She’d seen the Tevinter earlier, but he was a wisp now, his footsteps on the stairs. “Nothing,” she said. “I dropped off into the Fade. I do that from time to time, though not as often as you, I imagine.”

His jaw was set. He looked very worried. Sene tugged on his shoulder. “I’ll leave you two,” she whispered.

“No, Sene, it’s all right,” said Lea.

“Stay,” said Solas.

It was stern. Sene obeyed, hesitant. Something seemed to be happening, as there was a lot of tension in the room. Solas pulled up two chairs and poured a glass of water. He handed it to Lea who took a sip and set it on the windowsill. He and Sene sat across from her in the living room. She looked pale, it was true, and very tired, though Sene would not have said she looked altogether unwell. Just not sprightly. Solas was shaking his head continuously.

“Vhenan, get out of your head,” said Lea.

“Are you all right?” he said. He was leaning toward her with his elbows on his knees. Sene sat with her hands tucked in her lap, staring at the wood grain of the floor. She saw a little green caterpillar make its way into a crack and disappear.

“Yes,” she said. "I know what you're getting at, and yes."

“Dorian said you were asking for me,” he said.

“I was,” she said. “But I hardly remember. I was half asleep.”

“What did you need?” he said.

“It was a dream,” she said. “I’ve been having a lot of them since you came here. I lose track.”

“So you don’t need anything?”

“No,” she said. She smiled at Sene, tired, the lines around her eyes deeper today. She reached out, patted Sene on the knee. Sene smiled, too. “I want for nothing.”

“Are you sick again?” said Solas. He had fixated on her. Sene could tell, even Lea had a hard time with his focus.

“No,” she said. “I am not sick. I told you that already.”

“Then what is this?”

“What is what?”

“You look exhausted."

“Well, thank you,” she said, smoothing her hands over her hair. “It's barely dawn, and I’m as young as I was last you saw me. I just get tired sometimes. You, however, have aged, Solas. A little. In a good way.”

“No jokes,” he said. “Is the same thing that happened before going to happen again? Tell me now.”

Lea straightened up, lifted her chin. “No,” she said. She leveled with him, eye to eye. “It isn’t.”

Outside, the sun was coming up in full now. The heat was prickling along the back of her neck. The birds were singing in little flocks. The swallows were swooping past the windows. She felt Lea, watching her. Eyes flashed. Sene thought she could feel her throat, closing. She swallowed some air.

“What is it, sweetheart?” said Lea, predictably.

“Nothing,” said Sene.

“It’s all right,” she said. She shrugged. “You can ask.”

Solas looked at her, right at Sene. He was curious, forgiving.

Sene cleared her throat. “I just—” She looked at Lea. “When Mythal told me what happened to you, she said she didn’t know what caused it. What kind of sickness you had.”

“Mythal told you this?” said Solas.

“Yes,” said Sene. “I asked her.”

“Why didn’t you ask me?”

“You were in Par Vollen,” said Sene, looking down at her knees. “And before that, it was too—raw. I couldn’t bring myself.”

“You want to know how I died,” said Lea.

“Yes,” said Sene. “Don’t you, Solas?”

He seemed completely surprised, like she had just done something entirely out of character, and yet, it was not. It was just like Sene. He knew it, and he felt his anxiety, all of it over what had happened to him and to his mother suck into his heart and choke him. She had read his mind. “Yes,” he said.

“Solas,” said Lea.

“Yes."

“Look at me.”

He obeyed.

“It was magic,” she said. “Magic is what made me sick.”

He merely watched her. He did not seem surprised, but he was calculating something in his mind now.

Lea sensed his preoccupation, put her hands into his, squeezed them hard. “I spent many years suppressing my magic, Solas. Especially once we got to the Blue Fortress. You must know this."

"To some extent," said Solas. "I didn't know it was killing you."

"Well, it was," she said. "There are consequences."

"What's keeping it from happening again?"

"Look around you," said Lea. "Does it look like I'm holding back, Solas? When I first woke, I clawed my way out of the earth and found one of your mirrors, in perfect condition in the bottom of that valley below. I wept when I couldn't get it to open, so I broke the lock, and I destroyed it, and I put your worm hole into a well to give myself a connection to the outside world, just in case you were to ever wake up and stumble upon the source. I've buried your orb in the garden, purified Mythal's magic, so that it may become your own, overnight. These are things that cannot comfortably exist within the confines of your highly controlled, magical universe, so I stay here, hidden. But I do not suppress any longer."

"Then why did you do it back then?" he said. "Why."

"In Arlathan?" she said, relinquishing her hands, wringing her skirt. "I was filled with darkness. I was depressed. You were there. Without your father, I had already lost my spine back in the Weathers, and once the war started, I didn't know how to live. I was alone. That is the way a woman like me finds her magic corrupted. Twisted. When she is at the end of her rope. My power was too large, and we saw this happen to a thousand women like me."

“You mean Ghil," said Solas.

Sene watched him patiently. Lea seemed to sense that she’d stepped into some sort of minefield by accident. “Yes, like Ghil."

“She wept at your funeral,” he said, the memory seeming to flood in and surprise him. “She had not lost her mind completely, not yet. She loved you, and me. That could have saved her, but she wouldn't let it. Because Ghil was broken. Ghil was weak.” He scrubbed at his eyes. It was a brute, fast movement, something Sene had never seen him do before. He caught himself hard at the edge of his sanity. "I know what you're trying to tell me, but you are not Ghil. Even Ghil was not Ghil. Not in the end."

“I’m sorry, vhenan,” said Lea. "You're right."

“Do not be sorry."

“Please trust me," she said. "You were twenty-three years old back then, Solas. You believed only what you saw. My heart was black. Living in that pristine castle, exactly like the one I spent so many years trying to escape. Your father took me out of that place, and his death put me right back. I loved you and I loved Mythal, but I was widowed by my purpose. I had no purpose, and without a purpose, magic like mine turns evil. So I withheld it. I knew exactly what would happen to me if I did, and yet I did it anyway. That is why I am not like Ghil. But there are byproducts, like I said. I developed a rot inside my heart, and over time, it killed me.”

He glanced up at her. “You knew what would happen?”

"Yes."

"Why didn't you warn me?""

“Because,” she said. “Your heart was taken care of, and the world was trembling beneath us. I was mistaken. I should have told you, but I didn’t. There are a myriad of reasons why I did not tell you, Solas.”

“You wanted to die,” he said. “You know I would have intervened, and you wanted to die.”

She stared at him, her voice soft, shaking. “Yes," she said. "Some part of me wanted to die. But not anymore. I promise, Solas. I'm so sorry.”

He bit down, hard. He nodded once, like he understood, but then he got up. He had his head down, and he looked a little mean all of a sudden. Very stern. Sene knew this look, and she thought he might hit something, like the wall. He clenched his fists instead. He went into the kitchen. He pressed down against the kitchen table hard with his knuckles.

"Vhenan," said Lea.

He only shook his head. Then he pushed off, and he left. He left the house. They heard the front door slamming shut behind him.

Lea winced, startled by the noise. "Shit," she said.

“He’ll be okay,” Sene said quietly. She thought about Wisdom. She thought about this other time, way long ago, in the Hinterlands, before they had kissed, before anything. When they were in that creepy place, Witchwood, and one of the mages had fucked up Solas's staff, and Solas had been forced to contend with him physically. He’d put the mage down with his fists, and then he broke his neck, and he was so riled afterward, he’d just left the scene. He left her, Dorian, Bull, everybody. He made sure nobody was dead, and then he left. She tracked him to the lake where his staff lay in glittery pieces in the grass, and she leaned against a rock nearby, waiting for him to cool off. It took a long time, but once he did, he said her name, and she went over to him, and he kissed her on the wrist as they sat there by the lake. It had been a first for them and it left her breathless.

Sene looked at Lea, who seemed shaken. “He’ll come back,” she said. “He always comes back. He’ll be okay."

“I’m sorry, Sene,” said Lea. She began to cry into her hands. “There was selfishness inside me then. I was an imperfect woman. I led an imperfect life.”

“It's okay,” said Sene. "My life's not perfect either."

Lea looked at her very clearly now. What she saw—it multiplied. It made her smile. “You have hidden depths that no one knows but him,” she said.

Sene shrugged. “I’m just me.”

“Once he retakes his power,” said Lea, wiping her cheeks on the heels of her hands, “he will repair the Veil and return what is left to the stars. He is a man in his heart, Sene. He needs you.”

Sene could feel herself peeling away from the topic, her blood beating in her throat.

"Do not fear him," said Lea.

Sene nodded. She was trying to agree. She wanted to. On an emotional level, she thought she understood a great deal of what was going on here, but she couldn't be sure. The scale was so out of proportion. She had so little perspective. She thought she might get ambushed again. All she could do was wait.

“When you first met him,” Lea went on, changing the subject, “what did you think of him, Sene? If you don’t mind my asking. I just want to know.”

“Just that he was tall,” said Sene, smoothing her hair. “Too tall. Cute. A little mean.”

Lea laughed at this. “My son is not mean,” she said. "Tall and cute, yes. A bit of a hothead, and he is certainly not much of a joiner, but he is not mean."

“It was a front,” said Sene, feeling like something had changed all of a sudden. She felt heavier, but it only lasted a moment. She couldn't place it after that. "It still is sometimes."

 

After he didn’t come back inside for a little while, and Lea had made a pot of tea to calm herself and prepare for breakfast, Sene began to get antsy, so she did what she did and went out to find Solas. Just like in Haven, bouncing from rooftop to rooftop to rooftop, but this time, he was easy to find. He was right outside, just standing there, at the edge of the yard, looking down into the valley below in the light of the new day with his hands in his pockets. She approached with caution, but he was okay now. She could tell. She was relieved.

"I want to ask you something," she said. She stood beside him.

“Sure,” he said.

“It can wait.”

“It’s all right, Sene.”

“It’s about when we get old,” she said.

This seemed to amuse him. He smiled, glanced at her. “What about it?” he said.

But she got lost. These moments between them—they still undid her. He was still very cute, and it was a kind of sorcery. The pieces of her mind scrambled into one another and lost their meaning.

“Sene?” he said.

“I forgot,” she said.

He smirked. “When we leave here,” he said, “let’s go through the mirrors to Kirkwall. Then, let’s ride to Ansburg. Either tonight, or tomorrow. Just us.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” he said. “I need to meet your family so that we can tell them about our engagement. You and I are celebrities, Sene. Once the post gets a hold of this, the news will spread like wildfire. I know there is already tension between you and your parents and your Keeper. Not hearing it from us would only make things worse.”

“Then I should probably tell Cullen he’s still in charge,” said Sene.

“He’ll be fine,” said Solas. “We’ll send the rest of them home. Cassandra can relieve the Commander of his immediate Inquisitorial responsibilities, if he so wishes. Though I sort of doubt she'll have the time.”

“You have a very strong, stern speaking voice,” said Sene, “Ser Solas. Maybe you should stay Inquisitor when we get back to Skyhold.”

“Nice try, Lady Herald,” he said. She blushed. “But the Inquisition is about to undergo a strong transitional period. It needs you.”

“What if something bad happens while we’re gone?” she said.

“Then we’ll go fix it,” he said. Together, they looked down at the valley. It seemed to bubble up and breathe blue. What was it down there? Just a broken mirror and a well. That could not be it. There were rustlings in the trees, like from animals. Solas still had his hands in his pockets.

“Solas," said Sene. She looked at her bare feet. The grass was wet.

“Yes, vhenan.”

“Do you blame her?” she said. “I know I can't fully grasp everything that happened, but it seems complicated. She really loves you.”

He sighed. “I do not blame her,” he said. “What's done is done, and she came back. That is what matters now. I just...needed to go.”

“I get that,” said Sene. "Obviously." She wanted to take his hand, but she wasn't sure how. He seemed extra tall that morning. “She said that after you fix the Veil, you’ll release your power to the stars. What does that mean?”

He took a deep breath, looked up at the melty morning sky. “It means that if I kept it,” he said, “all of it, with enough time, I’d become like her. This kind of power is too big for our world when used on a regular basis, vhenan. Even in fractions. I’d have to live in isolation, or hide it away to avoid suspicion. And she knows I won’t do any of that. I'll still be the mage I was when this is all over, but the old power, or what's left of it after the Veil, I'll send that home.”

“Home?"

“Yes. Home. To the stars. That's where it comes from."

"Why doesn't Lea release hers?" said Sene. "To the earth. At least part of it. Then she could leave this place."

"Because my mother is not me," said Solas. "And because her power is born. It is a part of her. It would regenerate itself over time, so even if she could, the effort would be ultimately fruitless. Do not worry about her, vhenan. She is different now. Stronger than she was. That, in there, that pissed me off, but her heart remade itself intact. I can sense it."

Sene thought it was a beautiful notion. An intact heart, just like her own. "So, you forgive her?" she said.

"Of course I do," he said.

"You know, before the whole Kirkwall thing, I saw Abelas. In the Hinterlands."

This interested him. He looked at her. "You did?"

"I did," she said.

"Is he all right?"

She nodded. "We talked. I didn't tell him about Mythal. He met a Dalish girl. Her clan took him in. It's the same clan that took you in, after you ran off in the Exalted Planes. Her brothers are the ones who helped you get back to Skyhold."

 _Lahlas and Datishan._ He remembered. "I remember," he said. "Why are you telling me this now?"

"Because he said something about you," she said. "He was a little messed up. He said that you are not a man who forgives."

Solas shifted his weight, flexed his jaw, hands still in his pockets. He looked back at the house, then back at Sene. "I know what he is talking about," he said. "I'm not that man anymore."

"That's what I told him."

"Thank you, Sene," said Solas. "For telling me he's okay."

She smiled. But she felt a chill then. She looked around for the source. There was no wind that morning. “What does your power look like?” she said out of nowhere. "Your true power. I'm curious."

He glanced at her. It was an unexpected question. “To me, or to you?”

“To you,” she said.

“Just math,” he said, staring back up at the clouds now, eyes on the sky. “A great deal of math.”

"That's weird," she said. She rubbed her hands over her bare arms. The little hairs were standing up. She had goose bumps. “When are you going to do it, Solas?” she said then, feeling brave all of a sudden. It was like electricity in her veins.

“Do what?” he said.

She was itching. It was her whole body trapped in a box of lightning. _What the fuck?_ She looked around. She looked back to the garden. She thought she saw the ghost of a tree, but there was nothing. “You know," she said. "Retake your power."

The world crinkled like paper. She felt it all stop. Solas had taken his hands out of his pockets. They were stained dark with soil, dirt under his fingernails as if he’d been digging in the earth. 

"Solas?" she said.

"I already have, vhenan," he said.

He looked at her. He looked the same. She took a step back, even still. She may not have been a mage, but her heart was always one step ahead. She just didn't know it at the time. Solas held his hands out in the space between them. This was real magic, she was learning. Real magic was quiet. Real magic was dirt on your hands and running water and mirrors and treehouses and birds and wells and butterflies and paper cranes and invisible barriers that sang in lovely registers that no one but elves could hear. Real magic snuck up on you.

But this was not an ambush. It was more like a dream. She heard the wind chimes, her own pulse. She smelled the sea. “Solas?” she said once more to the man who forgives, like she was searching for him in the crowd. Her voice felt very small and far away in comparison.

But it was okay. He was okay, just like she'd said back in the treehouse. He took her hands. She let him. His were big and warm.

She felt it then, immediately—the magic. Filling her, every part of her, very old, and she knew that it was true, but she was no longer afraid. She breathed in, deep, closed her eyes. She felt miraculous. She felt like the world was all flooded with bells and fountains, ticking clocks and castles in the sky. She could taste the Veil. Like whiskey and fire and elfroot and absinthe. Sadness. Champagne. And then it was an old weight. The heart of all things, gravity. Even still, she felt her head floating away into the stars.

“I am right here." His voice was very low to the ground and very warm to her. Very close. She felt safe. “I'm right here," he said. "Can you feel me, vhenan?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **END BOOK IV**


	55. Two for the Road

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **BOOK V: SEASONS OF LOVE**

_1_

Mythal awoke. The sun reached through the curtains and touched her tangled brown hair. She allowed herself to feel, and then she pushed back the covers. She wore a nightgown that went down to her ankles. She always slept cold and she still sometimes thought about how Solas had used to sleep cold as well, a man of his bedsheets. He’d burrow halfway into the mattress, stealing them all for himself. But true love needs a heater, she knew that now. Even still, it was a beautiful day outside, with the swallows divine as marionettes. It seemed to be sometime in the late morning.

Mythal fluffed her brown hair. She had never slept this late before. Ever. Not even when she was nineteen years old and used to drink gin at the crystalline nightclubs of Arlathan and do so many weird drugs with asshole shithead boys, letting them take her hallucinogenic virginity. She always woke up with the yawning of the day even still, her body hard as brass, as she’d always had something to do back then, something to train for, swords to swing and things to prepare and people to hate and see. But she no longer had any of those things. Instead, all she had was time, and this treehouse.

The others had been gone for a week. They made happy, tearful goodbyes in the yard, Solas and Sene, making promises to return before the wedding. Mythal cried for a very long time that day, watching them all leave like that. Not because she still loved him, even though she did still love him, in her way, and she always would, but because she was, secretly, in her burnt out heart, terrified of endings. She did not like endings, because she did not know how to make herself new, not without him. She had been enticed by the new world and all that it offered her—friends, women like Cassandra, and Sera. Men like Bull. But she wasn’t ready. Lea had told Solas the truth about her death, and he forgave her. He forgave everyone now, because he was ready. He was a forgiving man. He forgave Lea, and Lea forgave her, and Mythal forgave him, and they all forgave each other for their ancient sins, and now they’d live out their mortal lives in separation. That’s how it was meant to be. Mythal just wasn’t ready, not yet.

The night Solas left the Weathers, there was a massive thunderstorm. Huge purple waves crashed the shores of the Backwater, flooding the tide pools, choking the canyons. Mythal and Lea sat together on the porch in a pair of rocking chairs, blankets wrapped around their shoulders, drinking tea spiked with whiskey and watching the sky.

“I can no longer remember Arlathan,” Mythal said to Lea, warming her hands to the mug. “Didn’t your old house face the other direction?”

“Yes, it did,” said Lea. The valley below glowed eerily beneath the sideways rain. The spirits down there liked to hold little conventions, holy prayers to the weather. They were pure beings, older than Elvhenan itself. Nobody knew what they were made of, not even Solas, though like his father, he’d befriended many in the Fade.

“I remember Winter Street,” said Mythal. “And River Street. River Street had all the casinos.”

“No,” said Lea, correcting her. “Winter Street was casinos. River Street was just taverns. One dive after the other. I had my first kiss with Marin in one of those taverns. They were not classy joints, but they served cold beer. I miss beer.”

Mythal was enchanted. “That is a beautiful story,” she said.

Lea shrugged. “It was an act of rebellion at the time,” Lea said, “kissing the architect’s son in a tavern made of wood on River Street. but it turns out I actually loved him.”

“Yes, well,” said Mythal, looping the hair behind her ear. “I could tell you all about that sort of thing.”

“Solas was not an act of rebellion, Mythal,” said Lea. “You were the one.”

Mythal waved her off. “You did not approve.”

“Our lives were difficult back then, Mythal,” said Lea. “And they colored my perceptions, yes. Maybe the two of you were not right for each other in every perfect little respect, but nobody is, not really, and that was a time and a place. It was a different life. Now, it is time to go out into the new world. Make new friends. Find a new man. There are many here, in this world, for you to choose from, if you please.”

Mythal looked down into her tea. “I don’t know what man is going to want me. I’m thirty-seven years old, about as useful as a dishrag.”

“Then perhaps you’ll find a nice dishwasher,” said Lea, smirking. “A divorcee with big, strong hands, hands he uses to wash all of those dishes, right after he cooks the two of you dinner in your cottage, and then he can take you upstairs and make use of you however you like.” She drank deep.

Mythal sipped. She was demure. She did not laugh. Perhaps it seems like a joke to you, but Lea knew the truth. Mythal had many dreams those days. She had always been fanciful, and she loved a good story, and she loved men. She immediately pictured her life—the little life of a dishwasher’s wife. Oh, the satisfaction. She could wear a brown apron that she’d sewn herself out of linen. She could bake her own bread.

Thunder cracked in the distance. The storm was passing. “Have you been out to the Backwater?” said Mythal. “Since your return. I wonder what it looks like.”

“It is a blanched out old seaside,” said Lea. “Nothing more, nothing less. A great many outcroppings of ancient limestone. Those are interesting. I go out to the sea to gather fish.”

“All by yourself?”

“Of course. I can show you.”

“Who showed you?”

“Marin,” said Lea. “Who else?”

“That would be very nice,” said Mythal. “I’ve never been fishing. Will we go on a boat?”

“Don’t need a boat,” said Lea.

“What do we need?”

“A couple of rods and reels and a net. A tackle box filled with bait. We can pack a picnic lunch and everything, bring some wine. We’ll go in a couple of days after the tide lowers.”

“What is a tackle box?” said Mythal.

Lea smiled. Their tea was cooling, but it still made little poofs of alcoholic steam in the cool, wet air.

Mythal remembered a particular moment then, one night many years before, in her Blue Fortress, where so many of her particular memories took place, when she had thrown a lavish party for June and his latest bimbo bride, and it was before the war had gotten out of hand, and Solas was still her General and they had been lovers for about half a year. Leanathy was still alive. Mythal had been wearing these very long, dangly earrings that night. They were beautiful antiques but heavy and entirely impractical, and while she’d been in the powder room, adjusting the lace on one of her high-heeled shoes, one of those earrings caught itself on the delicate silk sleeve of her dress. She was crooked and in a bind. She tried to unlatch the hook at the back of her ear, but her fingers were too weak, or else the thing was just hopelessly stuck. Her handmaiden, meanwhile, would not touch her, for fear of snagging a hole in the fabric of her dress, and no matter how Mythal reassured her that she did not care, she did not care about the dress, she could not convince the girl otherwise.

So she sent her handmaiden to find Solas. He was twenty-four by then, and she was thirty, and she knew he would have no problem ripping the fabric of her dress if he so needed. So he came to the powder room, alone, about twenty minutes later, smirking and pleased with himself in his silver tux. He teased her at first, because let’s face it, it was a comical dilemma, but afterward, he was soft, gentle, as always, and he smelled of whiskey and cigars, and he removed the earring from her sleeve with the careful precision of a clockmaker’s son. No tears in the fabric. He was so elegant. Smooth and easy. He said she looked pretty after that, despite her dramatic, clingy accessories, and he put the hair behind her ear, because that was his move, and she laughed. And then he locked the door so that they could be alone, and he took off her dress, and he discarded it like a chromy napkin to the white marble floor. He removed his jacket, and he picked her up, and he made love to her against the vanity mirror. Slowly, like he meant it. He always did. He was very good at that. These parts, she remembered best, because they were bodies _and_ minds. When they were finished, they spruced up, and he fixed her hair, and she retouched her lipstick, and they rejoined the party, and it was big enough and loud enough, and the lights were bright enough, and the drinks were strong enough, that nobody noticed. At least nobody who did not already know.

Solas and Mythal had been, in their time, a grand secret in the grand game of grand war and high society. Partners in most every respect, and, in the Blue Fortress, among the lives and chatter of the servants, their relationship was well understood and quietly revered. Sorrow, as Commander of the Sentinels and second in rank only to Solas himself, knew more than anyone—except Lea of course—simply by virtue of presence and observation. He played a lot of hardball with the other soldiers to keep the finer details a secret, and for this, she would always be grateful. Even still, everybody knew inside that castle. Everybody knew, and nobody told, because Solas and Mythal were beloved by their people. It was true. They were protectors. They played the game and they fought the war because they had to.

But they had an end in mind. That is what many did not know—not even Morrigan, for this was not a part of the narrative that Mythal had planted in the Well—that Solas had already outfitted his Fade prisons for their enemies, all but Ghilan’nain’s, long before the Veil. The Veil was just their failsafe. That was never supposed to happen. They were supposed to have more time. There was supposed to be two of them. Plans changed. To save the elves, Solas had to reboot the world. Of course, history did not see it like that. His vengeance played a role, and that is not a pretty picture. Many died in his wake, but many lived as well. It was a terrible tragedy in any case.

But that was the price. They lost time, power, elves. Even still, half the elves in existence were living deep in the shit dregs of the earth. Mythal knew this, but Mythal still believed that, however messy things had gotten in the end, she and Solas had set something in motion, something good. Ridding the earth of those shit-eating evanuris. They would have exploded the planet, as a dying star. Then all those years went by, toiling away in Uthenera and the Fade.

But with Sene and Solas positioned as they were, so high up among the Thedosian elite, the elves were better off now than they had ever been. This was an upswing. They just didn’t know it yet. The world takes time, thought Mythal. Time to get better. Time is the only true constant, and we all know what happens when powerful mages fuck with time. We must wait for our spoils, for our reckonings, so to speak. There were elves everywhere, every kind, living out their days, their joy and their pain like the rest of us. And Mythal, alone now and powerless, would live under the slow hand of progress, and become one of them. It was that simple. Solas, however, was more. He had always been more.

She went downstairs now. Lea had made coffee. There was a carafe on the counter. Mythal poured herself a cup and went out to the garden. The sun was high and bright. The weather was improving. Lea was watering her plants with a yellow watering can that Mythal recognized from her old garden in the rooftops of the Blue Fortress. It was nice to see things as they were, and to recognize the past without having to relive it.

“Sleep well?” said Lea, tipping the watering can into the nasturtium.

“Yes, I did,” said Mythal. She was warm in her nightgown. She thought about just taking it off. No reason not to. But her gut said no. She was still quite modest. That was a core trait for Mythal. It was in her spine. She rolled up her sleeves instead.

“Tomorrow, we’ll wake up early,” said Lea. “I went out to the Backwater this morning to check on things. The tide is low enough. We might be able to catch some fish.”

“You’ve already been to the Backwater and back?” said Mythal. “That’s like ten miles. Maybe twenty?”

Lea clicked her tongue. “You forget so soon,” she said. She nodded to the valley below. She had a lot up her sleeve, this woman. “Mirrors, love.”

Mirrors, love. Mythal sighed. They were still ancient elves, after all.

 

_2_

“Do not fucking pick up that card,” said Hawke. He slammed his hand down on the deck. He was nearly stark naked, save for the small piece he wore as underwear. It was Solas’s bet. This was Diamond Back at the Hawke Estate in Kirkwall, about three bottles in. “Please, Solas. Have mercy on my poor, forgotten soul.”

Fenris was shit-faced and bleary-eyed, staring at Hawke with the most indelicate grin he’d ever conjured. He refilled his wine glass, linen sleeves rolled up. “The big elf holds his cards with great authority, Garrett. Perhaps you should fold, like the rest of us.”

“Shh,” said Hawke. “I can’t fold, Fenris. _I can’t._ It is not in my code to fold. You know this.”

“Ah, yes. Your code. Tell me more about that.”

“Nudity is as admirable a code as any,” said Solas, fully clothed, across the table. He smirked in Hawke’s direction. “I will _not_ draw from the deck, to save you your forgotten soul. But I will raise. Your pot is empty, Hawke. So, if I am of any conscience at all, I must request that you choose with a heavy heart. Will you call my bluff?”

Sene tipped over in her chair, laughing. She crawled onto the floor. She pressed her forehead to Solas’s knee. At some point, she’d lost her scarf, and her belt, to Solas, and that was enough for her. She’d folded an hour ago. “Have mercy, vhenan,” she said.

“There is no mercy in Diamond Back, Isene,” said Solas, shrouded in a fine cloud of white smoke. He’d tied her scarf around his forearm, a pale blue trophy. He took a hit off the elfroot, ashed, passed it to Fenris. “You should know that by now.”

“I’m sorry, Hawke,” said Sene, still laughing, still on the floor. “I’m so sorry. You should have listened to me.”

It was not long before Hawke lived up to his code. Solas won.

They’d been in Kirkwall for one day and two nights. Hawke and Fenris had only just arrived from Skyhold that morning. The city was a bustling menagerie of elves and humans. Restoration had already begun on the Hanged Man, and there were flowers everywhere, in memoriam, and Chantry sisters who would stand by in peaceful welcome. Inquisition scouts lurked in the shadows and shiny soldiers marched wide open in the streets. Security had been tight in the city ever since the explosion, and now with Sene and Solas in town, it was even tighter.

But they did not want to stay long. They did not relish inconveniencing civilians. They had spent that entire afternoon with the Viscount, discussing the Inquisition’s role in rebuilding. They’d also gone to visit the alienage with Daniel—Solas’s old friend from that initial night in Kirkwall, and the only elven blacksmith’s apprentice in Lowtown. The Viscount was getting on in years. There was talk of initiating an Inquisition representative in his place. Sene thought Varric might be good for the job. Solas laughed at this, at first—but there was a certain novelty about it. Varric was from Kirkwall, knew its insides better than anyone. He was diplomatic, bright, his connections to the Merchant’s Guild would prove useful, and in light of his friendship with Solas and Sene and the situation at the Winter Palace, he’d developed a keen eye for the plight of the elves. None of this was to say that his family also held connections to the Lavellans, and though Sene probably didn’t see it at the time, such connections would have greatly benefited her clan. In any case, he was a sure candidate, though the decision would not be made for some time.

That night, Sene and Solas dragged upstairs, heavy with booze. Hawke, unwilling to leave until they did, sat with his forehead pressed to the table while Fenris simultaneously laughed and also reassured him that he was still a great big warrior, very strong, and the Champion of Kirkwall.

“Don’t you see?” said Fenris. “I love you better this way.”

“Then why are you smirking?”

“Because, Garrett,” said Fenris. “I am an enormous asshole.”

Hawke sighed. “I think my hangover is starting.”

“It’s not even one.”

“I need a drink.”

Sene closed the door behind them. The room was very big but it was of simple decoration. The curtains looked like they’d been stitched by a little old lady with a skilled hand. There was a mirror and many bright, weird still-life paintings and a big bed with a heavy, wooden frame. Sene was sort of glad to be back in a place where you had to pee in an outhouse. She would not admit to Solas that his mother’s flushing toilets and running water faucets scared the shit out of her.

She turned around. He smiled. He began to unravel the braid over her shoulder. “Alone at last,” he said.

“Vhenan,” she said, still sort of laughing.

"You folded very soon,” he said, grazing his knuckles to her jaw. “As much as I enjoy Hawke’s company, I never intended to get him naked. He is worse than Thom.”

“We can play again if you like.”

He just smiled, undoing the laces at her waist with such quiet dexterity. It was fast, a surprise. He wet his fingers with his mouth, and when he touched her at first he was so gentle she could have screamed. He lost a little bit of control once he had her against the door, sending her past the edge. He took her out of her shirt, and then she took him out of his, flushed and eager, and the moment they hit the bed, they were in it.

But it was an unusual circumstance. They hadn’t sexed since the treehouse. Something changed, something bright in the air between them, like magic, and he didn’t even have the chance to get inside her. The anchor flared up at her wrist. It whipped, whistled, cracked. Sene swore and smacked into the headboard immediately. She was backing way away from him. The noise was loud. “Fuck.”

There are these moments when you realize that the end is so near, you need to shut the fuck up and take it. The power in him got big, like a molten core, and he pulsed and took Sene by the wrist. On his knees in front of her, surveying the anchor as a tool. He did not panic.

“That hurt,” said Sene, terrified. The small sound of her voice brought him back, hard, to reality. “What the fuck, Solas?”

“Patience,” he said. “Be calm, Sene.” He closed his eyes, wrapped both of his hands around her fist.

Outside, there was a cold tremor in the city. Like a parade swelling up in the taverns down below. But it was only last call. It was only the people leaving the bars and flooding out into the hard cobble streets, heading homeward. The whole world smelled of booze and aftermath.

“Solas?”

He calmed the anchor then in one mechanical shift of the mind. He looked pained. Then he looked at Sene.

“Is there a rift?” she said.

“No, vhenan,” said Solas, catching his bearings. “It’s me.”

“I don’t—okay,” she said. She couldn’t get a hold of her breath. “Why did it hurt? It’s never hurt before.”

“Let me remove it, Sene.”

She just stared at him. She seemed completely shocked. The mood had dropped completely, and this jarred them awake from their carefree, smoke-filled haze of love.

"What?" she said. 

"The anchor.” He held her hand so gently. “Let me take it back.”

“You can do that?”

“Now, I can.”

Her hair seemed to get bigger, like static electricity. She shook her head. She was in some sort of disbelief. “I need it,” she said.

“No, you don’t,” he said.

“Who will close the rifts?”

“I will,” he said, kissing her knuckles. “That is what it means to repair the Veil, vhenan. No more rifts.”

“No more rifts?” she said.

He shook his head.

“But then—what am I supposed to do?”

This confused him. “What do you mean?” he said.

“What do I do? If there’s no rifts—who am I?”

The question was like a hook in his insides. Her freckles were so brown, he noticed. From the sun, from the weeks they’d spent apart. She looked so scared. She looked just like the first time he’d ever met her. Down by that frozen ravine, sticking her hand in the snow.

_Trying to freeze it off?_

“You’re the Inquisitor, Sene,” he reasoned. “Try to think clearly.”

“I am thinking clearly.” She shook out her head, she looked away. When Sene was emotional, she was not articulate. She lost her faculties, Solas knew. She became erratic. She had to let it all build up inside, and then she would burst. She was going to cry now. He could feel it. He didn’t know how to stop her. “They only made me Inquisitor because I could close the rifts,” she went on, “and I can only close the rifts because of the anchor. If I don’t have the anchor, then why am I the Inquisitor?”

Solas searched her eyes for anything he recognized. “You’re the Inquisitor for many reasons, Sene. The anchor—that was only the beginning. You know this.”

“Do I?” she said. “What am I without it, Solas? What I was before? Just some too-tall fucking Dalish girl? A huntress? You’re fucking Fen’Harel.”

“You are still the Inquisitor,” he said, very stern. He couldn’t help it. He had to make her see. “Don’t play the Fen’Harel card. Not now.”

“Why not? It seems like a pretty good time.” It was aggressive. “You are, after all, Fen’Harel.”

“Fine,” he said. “I am Fen’Harel. Yes. The Dread Wolf is my legacy. But to those who know the truth, who know me, that legacy is a lie. You’re the same thing, Sene. You’re the Herald of Andraste, real or storied. The shining steed, remember? It’s the same thing, just with different moral alignments.”

“Stop.”

“You’re a savior,” he went on. “You’re a leader of men. You’re a Lavellan. You’re an extremely powerful woman, and I know none of this means anything to you based on the way you’re looking at me right now, but I know that’s because, despite the fact that it’s all true, none of it is paramount to who you actually are.”

“Which is what?” she said.

“Try to remember the people that love you,” he said. “ _I_ love you. You make my life better. You’re asking _me_ who you are? You’re just _you_. That is who I want. That is what you said to me, that first night we spent together. When I asked you if you were nervous, you just shrugged your shoulders, and you said, _I’m just me._ Do you remember? Don’t forget who you are, Sene. A lot has happened, but you are not this. You are not the anchor. The anchor is a means to an end, not you. It is my mistake. The Breach was my fault. The Veil is my responsibility. And you’ve carried me and my burden for over a year. Now, let me finish it. Let me fix this.”

Every bit of conviction he had, he poured into her. The room felt small and hot. He thought she might take a swing at him, like in the Arbor Wilds, or Crestwood. Sene did not like to be told what to do.

“Are you finished?” she said.

“I am,” he said.

She dropped her guard. She threw her arms around his neck and hugged him furiously.

It was a surprise. She was so strong. He hesitated at first, not entirely sure of her motives, but Sene was earnest. So he held her, one hand at a time—pressed them around her bare, freckled body in this candlelit room in Kirkwall. How did they even get here? She smelled like sweat and lemons and elfroot and gin. He loved her so much, it was like swallowing a piece of the earth. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Sene,” he said.

She sat back on her heels. She wiped her eyes like she’d been crying, and she had a little. She sniffled. “I know you have to take it,” she said. “I know. I just—I wasn’t prepared. I freaked out.”

He bit down, nodded once. “I understand that, Sene. I didn’t mean to freak you out.”

“One more rift, okay?” she said, looking up at him, hopeful. “Let me close one more rift. Then, you can take it back, do what you have to.”

He smiled at this. It was not what he expected. “It’s a deal,” he said.

She blushed. She looked down at her hand, squeezed it open and shut. She settled her head on his chest then. He put his arm around her. Her enormous hair tickled his chin. Solas looked out to the city streets below, feeling both as desperate and as hopeful as he ever had. The world was empty, save for the two of them. At least that’s how it seemed. There was only a shattered bottle in the yard below and the sounds of the crickets.

“In the morning,” she said after a little while. “Let’s leave first thing, okay?”

“Okay,” said Solas.

“Are you nervous?” she said. She looked up at him.

He almost laughed. The notion was so far away by now, but he was glad to change the subject. “I do not get nervous, vhenan.”

She nudged him. “Sure you do.”

“I am ready.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes,” he said, smirking. “I was born for this, Sene. Literally.”

“What is your plan?”

“My plan is simple,” said Solas, kissing the tip of her ear. “Your mother will be easy, because I think she’s a little like you, and you’re very easy.”

“What?”

“You’re like butter, vhenan,” he said. He put the hair behind her ear. “You melt quickly. Do not pretend otherwise. Meanwhile, your father will stump me on purpose. Based on what I’ve gathered in reconnaissance, he’s somewhat of a stoic man, but he is also a businessman. He will test my patience, and we both know that I am very patient. Once that is tackled, there will be whiskey. I know how the booze elves like their whiskey.”

“Not me,” said Sene.

“Well, I have no need to impress you, vhenan.”

“Are you going to get him drunk?”

“No,” said Solas. “I just need him to open the bottle. Once there’s whiskey, I’ll be able to read him in a heartbeat. I need his trust, nothing more.”

Sene grinned. “That is an excellent strategy, Solas.”

“Thank you, Inquisitor.”

“What about Deshanna?” she said.

He sighed. “Deshanna is more complex,” he said. “He will want proof. His concern is not as much for your happiness as it is for the good of the clan. That is more difficult, because it is unemotional.”

“What kind of proof are you talking about?”

“Proof of my worth,” he said. “I need to offer him something unique if I am to gain his approval.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“Not really,” said Solas. “Though it is a challenge. I understand it perfectly. I’m still working on my angle. A lot will depend on his demeanor.”

“What, exactly, are you hoping to accomplish with this, Solas?” said Sene. She was tracing her thumb across his knuckles, counting the scars. “I’m gonna marry you.”

“I know that,” he said. “But I need to keep this close to my vest, vhenan. If that’s all right.”

“You’re kind of a dork,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

She shrugged, rosy-cheeked.

There was a big noise then, from downstairs. It sounded like something heavy had tipped over. Like a bookshelf or an armoire or a man. They looked at each other. Solas turned his head toward the door. “Hawke?” he shouted.

“Everything’s fine!” said Hawke, coming up the stairs. He sounded winded. There were some other muffled noises, too. They heard him whisper, “Leave the underpants, Fen. They’re all I’ve got left.”

Sene started laughing. “What the fuck?”

“It’s no bother!” said Hawke. Then he whispered, “Andraste’s tits.”

Solas made a small smile, barely anything at all. He could feel a tension, in his brow and in his jaw.

“What’s the matter?” said Sene.

He shook his head.

“It's okay,” she said, reading his mind. She could do that now, somehow. She showed him her hand. “I know your worried, but it's okay."

"I am worried," he said.

"I remember once, you said the anchor was getting used to me. In Haven, it used to feel weird and flare up all the time, and then it got used to me, right? Didn’t you say that?”

“Yes,” he said. “I did say that.”

“Maybe that’s all it is. Your power is new, Solas. Or, it's old, but it's newly acquired. You know what I mean. It’s gonna be okay. Please?”

“You’re sure you need another rift?” he said.

She nodded, very sure. “It’s been my job for like a year,” she said. “You have to understand.”

“I do,” he said. His kissed her temple. “I do, vhenan.”

“Please don’t be worried,” she said. “Or, I know you’re going to worry, but don’t let it eat you up, okay? Chin up, vhenan. This is my choice. You helped me.”

“I did?”

“Just now,” she said. “You yelled at me. That helped.”

“I certainly did not yell.”

“Whatever.” She shrugged.

Like a pretty window. He trusted.

“I think I miss Skyhold,” he said then, out of nowhere. “Do you, vhenan?”

“You miss Skyhold?”

“It’s been a long time,” he said. He traced one big hand from her collarbone, all the way down to her freckled hip. “Perhaps it’s more the people. Knowing everyone was downstairs. We’re never truly alone there.”

“I thought you liked being truly alone,” said Sene.

“I do,” said Solas, holding her tight. “I enjoy privacy very much. I just like having the option of the latter.”

More thumps in the hall. A door closing. “So sorry!”

Sene laughed a little. “Me, too,” she said, like butter.

They were so close to their hard journey’s end. So close.

 

_3_

A few days later, on a Lavellan compound far, far away, Morrigan was hunched over a pocket of grain in a great big amber field, wearing a wide-brimmed hat with a silver ribbon. Sene’s cousin Terys was there, a joint of elfroot pinched between his lips, and he was teaching her about the parts of a wheat plant, what they were, and what they did.

“See these weird things?” said Terys. He was opening up a stalk of grain with his big fingers. He had dirt under his fingernails and a little smudged on his cheeks as well. “These are the seeds, right here. See? This is the part you can eat, but you have to take off the outsides first. Those are called hulls. You don’t really want to eat those.”

“Should you be smoking in a farm field?” said Morrigan, eyebrows raised. She was supposed to be staring at the grain but she was, instead, staring at him and holding a basket full of knitting. She’d ultimately been on her way back from the blacksmith. The knitting was for Rasha, Sene’s mother.

“It’s way too wet for fires,” said Terys, releasing a cloud of smoke into the air. It was getting down to the nubbin anyway. He was a strong and handsome young man—dark hair, huge blue eyes, violently freckled, with the same pale vallaslin of Mythal that Sene had worn up until a couple of months before. Two dusty wings on his cheeks. “Come harvest,” he went on, “I wouldn’t be lighting this shit up anywhere near the stalks.”

“When will the harvest begin?” said Morrigan.

“About another two months,” said Terys.

“Interesting,” said Morrigan. She plucked one of the stalks from the earth. “I’ve never once spent real time on a farm, Terys. This is a unique experience for me.”

“Glad to be of service.” He smoked, aloof, but then he smiled. “Lady Morrigan.”

Morrigan rolled her eyes. She stood up, dusting off her long, purple skirt. Terys was very much like Matthew sometimes. A little eye rolling was necessary. He even looked like Matthew. An elf, of course, but he was so big and so tall, lanky, with that dark, rumpled hair, his casual demeanor, never quite standing up straight. And he was such a little shit sometimes, always, _always_ smoking. She was endeared by the boy. For a twenty-year-old, Terys had a lot of brute confidence. And he had this light air of privilege and money that fed him the courage to speak to an older woman with such authority.

Morrigan could feel herself moving deeper into the present those days as she walked the farm fields with Terys, worked the loom with Rasha, the garden with Kieran and Terys’s mother Yara, who was only a few years older than she was. She could feel her careful shell coming apart. It was frightening at times, as it was now becoming this blunt-force fear that she might one day forget him. Of course that was ridiculous. She would never forget him. That was not how love worked. But she had never been so exposed to a world so separate from his memory—the part where you _felt_ things without reliving them and how they’d used to feel with him. She could be happy without him. The realization was a very slow burn.

The Lavellans were salt of the earth, thought Morrigan. People were afraid of them, especially their Keeper, as he was some kind of serious figurehead, but in reality, they were just these big and beautiful elves with good teeth and freckles. So many freckles. And they had money, yes, and land, and power, but they knew everything there was to know about grain farming and distillation and the business of farming and the business of distribution. _They know everything._ They had earned their keep here in the Free Marches. It was fascinating and reassuring, thought Morrigan, to see such a huge clan of Dalish elves like this, somewhere out in the thick of it, living like they gave no fucks for what other people thought they were supposed to be. She could see now where Sene got her sense of courage, her ability to love, to trust, and to lead. She was so young, yet she walked so tall, despite a world that had all but forgotten her people. She had grown up with these things all around her—love, trust, leadership, charm. They had rained on her head and grown beneath her feet every single day of her young life. And Solas, she knew, would feel kept here. It was a country place full of good, country people. That was the way of his heart.

Terys walked Morrigan all the way to porch. You could smell the cooking through the windows—spare ribs and root vegetables. He was wearing a denim button-up shirt, half untucked and long linen pants. Work boots. He’d discarded the joint and was now picking his teeth with a toothpick. She wondered if this was just some sort of elf thing at large or if Sene had simply managed to fall in love with the one elven man in all of time and existence who was both different enough from her family to entice her and yet, in some ways, so much like the Lavellan men that it was almost comical.

“I’ll be back,” said Terys. “I gotta get the wine.”

But then his mother came through the front door. She was about six months pregnant, wearing a purple tunic with her long brown hair swinging past her waist. It was tied off her forehead with a light handkerchief. Yara was not as tall as Sene, but she was certainly not a short woman. Morrigan was, in fact, smaller than every single one of the women here, at least those in Sene’s immediate and extended family. It was astounding. The house where Sene’s parents lived was small but complete. It had sky blue birch siding and a red brick arch over the door. The door itself was painted green, adorned with a winter wreath made of ilex and some sort of intimidating bramble.

“Hey, lady,” said Terys. “Where’s dad?”

“In town,” she said. “With Revasan and Deshanna. Morrigan, how are you today?”

“I am well,” said Morrigan. “And yourself?”

“Very good.” She popped a strawberry into her mouth. She was a young mother, given Terys’s age. Thirty-seven or thirty-eight. “Is that the knitting goods?”

“Indeed.”

She called to Rasha.

“I’ll just bring them inside,” said Morrigan.

“When are they getting back?” said Terys.

“Gods know,” said Yara. “Not until later. It’s some bullshit with the Merchant’s Guild.”

“Why wasn’t I in on it?” he said, running a hand through his hair.

“Because you were in the fields, vhenan.” She tugged him by the ear. “Go get the wine.”

He smirked. He was off.

“Where is Kieran?” said Morrigan.

“Inside,” said Yara. “Come. We’re folding napkins into the shapes of exotic birds.” She raised her eyebrows. Morrigan smiled, in spite of herself. She followed Yara inside.

Morrigan couldn’t tell, but she’d had a dream the night before that Sene and Solas had gotten engaged and held a secret wedding on a great big mythical beach at the edge of the world somewhere. There were eagles swooping down into the water behind them, coming from every direction. The dream had felt so real, she could still almost taste the salt. She wondered, at times, how many of these perceptions were still leftover from Mythal. The Well and its knowledge had settled into her bones by now. It had normalized and found a home with her own particular magic. But every once in a while, Morrigan saw something or felt something in dreams that she knew she was not supposed to see or feel. The size of Solas’s hands. The little red curls on the back of Sene’s neck whenever she swept her hair up into a braid. There were other things, too, but almost everything had to do with Sene and Solas. It was surprising, accompanied by a maternal instinct, as if, after all these years of loneliness and heartbreak, they were the one thing Mythal still looked after. The one piece of this world she still sought to protect.

After dinner, Yara and Morrigan were doing dishes while Terys took out the trash. Rasha was in the living room, straightening up for after-dinner drinks. Kieran had slumped over into his mashed potatoes. He was now fast asleep in the guest bedroom.

“This place is a shit sty,” said Rasha, her red hair a work of complicated nettles, just like Sene’s.

“I believe the saying is _pig sty,_ Aunt Rasha,” said Terys, back in the house.

“Put out that joint,” she said.

“It’s after dinner.”

She gave him a look. He obeyed.

Morrigan wiped down the heavy, oak table. Yara poured them each a glass of brandy. “This is a very good year,” she said, handing one to Morrigan. “I think.” She shrugged.

“You know, I never had brandy until I came here, Yara.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Not in the slightest.”

Yara smiled into her snifter.

At some point, there was a knock on the door.

They all stopped what they were doing. Yara and Morrigan in the living room, sitting on the big, green couch, discussing whatever bullshit had come up on the agenda. Terys pouring more booze while Rasha finished putting away the dishes. It was a shock, as if nobody had ever knocked on the door before.

“Who the fuck is it?” said Rasha. It could not have been Revasan. Usually people just walked right in. They did not lock their doors. She was on her way to the foyer. She fixed her hair, like seventy-five metal pins and yet she could not get it to stick. She was wearing a yellow blouse and half-tipsy already from three sips of brandy.

She opened the door. It was Sene.

“Isene?” she said.

“I’m back,” said Sene.

The revelation, it took her breath away.

“Did we know you were coming?” said Rasha.

“I’m a surprise. As usual.”

“A surprise indeed,” said Rasha, cheeks warm. “I’m glad. How did you get in here without a commotion?”

“I live here,” said Sene. “Plus, I’m the Inquisitor. Half your guard is Inquisition Army, and it is their actual job to avoid commotion at all costs. They snuck me in. Anyway, we were just in Kirkwall for a job. It was unexpected. But I brought someone.”

Rasha smiled. She was wide open and big-hearted, like a bear. She always saw the good in people, and sometimes that made her seem weak, but other times, it made her life very easy. Standing behind Sene, all of a sudden, there was a man. Coming up the porch steps. A tall man, sort of massive across the shoulders and very trim. A handsome specimen. He had his hands behind his back. He approached, looking right at her.

“Mother,” said Sene, “this is Solas. I brought him, see? Just like you asked.”

He held out his hand and smiled. His hand was big, but it was a subtle gesture. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Lady Lavellan,” he said.

Everything sort of dropped off a cliff. Rasha blushed, huge. Her cheeks like two big freckled plums. She gave him her hand without question.

“Who the fuck is it?” said Terys from the kitchen.

“Dammit, vhenan. Language,” said Yara from the living room.

“Sorry.”

Rasha relinquished her hand. Solas placed his gently in his pockets. “The compound is beautiful,” he said. “Sene told me as much, but words cannot do it justice.”

“Thank you, Solas,” said Rasha. “I wasn’t actually sure that Sene appreciated its charm until just now.”

“Mother,” said Sene.

“What?”

Sene shrugged, gave her a look. Rasha smoothed her hands over her blouse and nodded in apology. “This is a surprise,” she said to Solas. “But I’m overjoyed. Please come in. We were just pouring more brandy.”

“Perfect,” said Solas.

“I’ll just have the pink wine,” said Sene.

Rasha sighed. “Of course you will.”

Sene smiled. Rasha let them pass. Solas moved quietly, seeming to take up very little space, despite his massive size. He had perfect posture, a man of elegance. Together, they entered the small, blue, Dalish house on the great big Dalish compound in the grand, rural middle of the Free Marches. Rasha took a deep breath. Her somewhat difficult daughter was home, and she had brought a very handsome man. She was prepared for this, but she did not know their history together. She did not know him. She was nervous, but she tried not to show it. Little moths and mosquitoes bounced off the lantern hanging over the porch, sizzling and buzzing, like they couldn’t help themselves. Rasha led them into the warm, warm house.

There was a commotion when they arrived in the living room. Rasha worried over Kieran, but then she remembered that it took a lot to wake a sleeping child. She closed the door. She watched how Solas held Sene’s hand, guided her without incident. It was strange as hell, but reassuring. She knew then that everything was okay. She trusted Sene completely, and so that meant she trusted him as well. She was fast, too. Sene had to get it from somewhere. And she had already melted. She went into the kitchen for one more glass of brandy and a single flute of the pink wine.

The night was young.


	56. Revasan

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _**Suggested Reading** : The very first conversation that Sene and Solas have in [Chapter 1](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/16972533), the first section of [Chapter 2](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/16974123), and part four of [Chapter 45](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/23875227). This is optional, of course, but relevant, especially if it's been a very long time since you read the beginning!_
> 
>  
> 
>  _Face claims for each of the Lavellans can be found[here](http://galadrieljones.tumblr.com/post/162959048911/the-lavellans-face-claims-and-bios-as-they-appear), for interested parties_.

“What the fuck is that display?” said Revasan. He was smoking, compulsively. It had been a long day. Ellas was already gone, shopping for furniture. Or something. They’d lost him on Main Street.

“That looks like Inquisition,” said Deshanna, hands in his pockets. The stars overhead were bright that night. No clouds for a hundred miles in every direction. “Are we expecting someone important?”

“No,” said Revasan, shifting. “How the hell would I know?”

“What’s the matter with you?” said Deshanna. They had men walking on all sides of them. There were a few on horseback to the rear of their caravan as they headed back to the compound on foot. “Are you smoking that cracked root from the Andrastians?”

"It’s not cracked root,” said Revasan.

“That shit will make you itch.”        

“I’m just smoking,” he said. “I’m just thinking.”

“About what?”

“I don’t like that guy we just talked to,” said Revasan.

Deshanna sighed.

“He was a schmuck.”

“Indeed.” They passed beneath the yellow light of a lamp post. The bugs were ticking off of it one by one. “Then who do you want, Rev?”

“Bertrand Tethras,” said Revasan.

“Tethras?” said Deshanna. “That man is a disaster.”

“No he isn’t,” said Revasan. “And anyway, this isn't about him. It's about who he knows. And Kirkwall is just a stone’s throw from Highever.”

“There is an entire sea between Kirkwall and Highever.”

“It’s a boring sea.”

“A boring sea full of pirates.” Deshanna scruffed at his beard. “You’d risk transport through Kirkwall? I imagine you’ve heard by now that a Qunari plot to assassinate your daughter was recently foiled in Kirkwall, by the man called Solas.”

Revasan gave him a look. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for reminding me that a bunch of fucking psychopaths are trying to murder my daughter.”

“Sit still,” said Deshanna. He put a hand on Rev’s shoulder. They passed two familiar faces then—a couple from the tannery. City elves. Everybody smiled in recognition. “All I’m saying is, Revasan," Deshanna continued, "it’s a shit place. I want as little to do with Kirkwall as possible.”

“I want Bertrand,” said Revasan, ashing his joint. He took one last hit and flicked it to the earth. “That is who I want. His ties to Sene, plus ours, plus the volatility of the region all guarantee that the Inquisition will play a role in the safety of our transport to Ferelden.”

“Ties to Sene?”

“Varric—his younger brother. He is highly ranked inside the Inquisition. Tell me you know this. Stop being a dick.”

Deshanna smiled. He had the face of a tawny, hale sixty-four year old man. His beard was like a mane. But he had a twinkle in his eye that not enough people gave him credit for. “You are a man of your impulses,” he said. “Lucky for you, they’re right. Most of the time.”

“Believe me. I know,” said Revasan. They approached the gates. There were Inquisition soldiers everywhere. “Okay, what the fuck is going on.”

They stopped then to survey the strange horses tied up in the stables. They didn’t miss a single detail, these men. They were like eagles. But somewhere back behind them then, they heard Ellas breaking into some sort of hysterical laughter. They turned around to welcome him with a great deal of idle disdain.

“For the love of fucking Mythal,” said Revasan. “What are you doing?”

“I bought three armoires,” said Ellas. He was accompanied by a young man on decorative stilts. “With antique brass inlays. The wood is in perfect condition. This is the man who sold them to me.”

“A businessman,” said Deshanna to the man on stilts. "It is good to meet you."

“The armoires will be delivered tomorrow afternoon,” said the man. He had a high, strange voice, and he did not seem intimidated by Deshanna in the slightest.

Ellas tipped him generously. They’d just come from the tavern. “Stay safe, my friend.”

“You as well,” said the man. He tipped his round bowler hat to both Revasan and Deshanna, and then he was off. Deshanna smirked, lazily. Revasan looked entirely miffed.

“What the fuck, Ellas?”

“Oh, lighten up, brother,” said Ellas, clapping a hand to his shoulder, picking his teeth with a toothpick. His beard was unkempt, but he had eyes like blue champagne. He also took to noticing the stables, fuller than usual. “Whose horses?” he said. “They look expensive.” He squinted around. “Is the Inquisition here? Like, more so than usual?”

“It appears so,” said Deshanna.

Finally then, sensing his entrance, the main watch approached. A young man with a hefty vallaslin of Sylaise. “The Inquisitor, sir,” said the watch to Deshanna, then Revasan, only half looking him in the eye. “She just arrived herself a few hours ago, unexpected. She was accompanied by Ser Solas, and a typical cavalry.”

“Sene is _here_?” said Revasan. He put a hand on top of his head. It was dark, and he was slightly freckled. He looked a bit like Terys, to be honest. It was a Lavellan thing. “Are you shitting me?”

“No, sir,” said the watch, standing very straight. “I am not shitting you.”

Deshanna hung his head backward to study the stars. “Isene. What a pleasant surprise.”

“ _Ser Solas_ , huh?” said Ellas. He lit a joint, elbowed his brother in the shoulder. “Nice.”

But Revasan was tight-jawed. He said nothing.

“I suppose we should go inside,” said Deshanna. His eyes crinkled up, handsome and papery, but resigned. “No use hemming and hawing. We’ll leave you to your personal politics, Rev.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“I will think on the Tethras bid. In the meantime, give Isene and her suitor my sincerest regards. I’ll see them both tomorrow.”

Revasan shoved his hands in his pockets. “My grace to Fisara,” he said. He then nodded solemnly to the watch who signaled his men to open the gate.

 

The compound was dark, night and silk. There was a breeze in the air that suggested spring, but Revasan knew better. There would be at least one more nasty bit of winter rain, bringing the sand bags out of the work sheds before the first harvest, and that was the truth. Last year, they’d lost crops around this time. Terys out there in his rain boots, looking like hell. About three dozen acres had been sucked underwater which isn’t really that much in the grand scheme of things, but it was enough to make his head explode. Up the path, fields on either side, he saw a few of Sene’s soldiers, strolling with their helmets under their arms. Off-duty, given free range over his acreage. He nodded at them with respect, hands deep in his pockets as he regarded the fireflies.

Revasan and Rasha’s house was by itself, exiled to a shady pocket of sweet gum trees. The path was lit with lanterns hanging from wires he’d strung up not a year ago. They’d still lived in encampments, right up until Sene went to that Conclave in the south. They had been lovely encampments, with heavy tents made to weather the storms, but they were still tents. These were houses. He was a Dalish man who lived in a house. When he was a child, Revasan mostly slept outside, in a sleeping bag under the pristine atmosphere. Like clear liquor it was, pouring down from the heavens. Ansburg was a provincial place that he loved, because the people here liked their sky. They were all equals under that fucking sky. He remembered the first time he met Rasha, and there were clouds in the sky, and how she’d been barefoot in the dank river sands of the Minanter, pointing her arrow at a goose.

 _Lift your elbow a little,_ he advised from the branches overhead.

 _Fuck off,_ she said and put her arrow in the dirt. The goose flopped away. Stupidly.

_I told you so._

They were both eighteen and married inside of a year.

He did not like changing circumstances. Rasha was threadbare in her soul. She had nothing outside this farm and these people—her parents, her sisters and her whole clan gone to the Blight. It was nasty, and it was ruinous. It made him so fucking angry. Once he knew a coal miner whose wife was bit by a snake and her throat closed up. She died of asphyxiation, by her own bodily function. When Sene was barely two, he and Rasha lost a newborn baby to the cold. It was the coldest winter in a century. All the crops died, several elderly, and one more infant. They tried for no more children. Rasha grew a thick shell as her spine went to mush.

What was life’s purpose in dealing such tragic hands? He’d gone to see the blacksmith’s shop that Sene had inherited seven times since her departure. Morrigan was looking after its well being and he had volunteered to personally vet a blacksmith for the job. But nobody was good enough. He had never known the old blacksmith who lived there and died there, who had taken in Sene and been her outsider friend at such a young age. He had missed so much of her life just being a fucking asshole. He was close-lipped and anxious about the men and women of the city. But he knew her. He always had, and he should have trusted she would be okay. He told himself this as he got to the porch steps that night, and through the walls of the house, he heard voices. He was a patriarch. He was forty years old. He was young and life was strange, even for Revasan, First to the Keeper of Clan Lavellan, living in a 500 acre compound of farm fields and free, wealthy elves in Ansburg. Fuck.

He was about to open the door. He had his hand on the knob when he sensed that he wasn’t alone. He turned around.

“Lord Lavellan,” said the man called Solas. It was a revelation. He had his hands in his pockets, just like Rev. He removed them as he approached, came up the steps and into the yellow lantern glow. “This must seem strange to you,” he went on, “but I’m Solas. I was just helping Morrigan get Kieran to the back house. He’s growing quite tall these days.” He held out his hand. “It is a pleasure to finally meet you.”

Revasan regarded the man called Solas, his open hand. He blinked, hard, and then he shook it without hesitation. “Solas,” he said, surfacing. “Yes. I know who you are. It is good to finally meet you as well. Please, call me Revasan.”

Solas smiled. The handshake had been strong, profound, and it broke the same way. “I apologize for the unexpected nature of our arrival, Revasan. We were in Kirkwall, on business. The decision was last minute.”

“That’s quite all right,” said Revasan, hands back in his pockets. _Kirkwall._ He looked around. He heard his wife’s laughter inside, calm and deep. Yara and Terys were there, which meant Ellas would soon show up looking for them, and he would be a little drunk, and content to go on forever about his three brand new armoires. “Would you like to have a drink with me?” said Revasan. “Solas.”

“Yes, I would,” said Solas. He was tall. He was bigger than Revasan, had him by one or two whole inches and probably fifteen or twenty pounds. But he was much younger, by at least ten years. It was very strange. Rev could feel it in his step, his demeanor, and the way he held himself—way far back on his heels, heavily focused, but playful. Sharp. This was a young man. And yet, he was not drunk. He was not even tipsy. He was a young man who had been here for nearly two whole hours and he was not even tipsy.

“There’s a gazebo,” said Revasan, placing his hands on his hips. “Behind the garden. Have Sene show you. I’ll meet you there.”

Solas nodded, easy-going. A man of patience and economy. He was wearing suspenders, self-made by his own hand.

 

Inside, everybody was burrowed into the living room. The bottle of pink wine was nearly empty. As was the bottle of brandy. Sene was four glasses deep and losing her resolve. The ride from Kirkwall had been long. Her eyelids were heavy.

“You’re a very cute vhenan when you’re sleepy,” said Solas, kissing her eyebrow. He helped her up off the couch. She leaned into him as he addressed the room. “We’ll take our leave.”

“Now don’t let my husband bully you,” said Rasha. She got up from the arm chair next to the fire. It crackled and whipped. She had swept the hair off her neck into a loose braid down her back. “He can be kind of intense.”

“I can handle it.”

Rasha smiled. She blushed. She got up and pinched him on the cheek. “The tallest man here.”

“Hey,” said Terys from the floor. He was sprawled out on his back.      

“Well, it’s true,” said Rasha.

“When did you even get as tall as you are?” Sene looked at Terys. “Before I left, you could barely look me in the eye.”

“I’m a growing boy, Ise,” said Terys, chewing on a wooden spoon. “You have to give me time.”

Sene sighed and looked back at her mother. “I’m too tired for my father,” she said. “I don’t want to.”

“Sene, go to sleep,” said Rasha. “I’ll take Solas back to the gazebo.”

“Where are we sleeping?” said Sene.

“In your room?”

“The bed is so small, and we're both so tall.”

“You’ll manage.”

“Our backhouse is empty,” said Yara. She was leaning against the hearth, working on her knitting. She had a pin in her mouth. “You can have it, but it needs to be cleaned.”

“Tomorrow,” said Solas. He looked at Rasha. “For tonight, Sene’s room will be fine.”

She smiled.

"I got this,” said Sene, straightening up, out of nowhere. “I’ll go.” She rubbed her eyes and yawned. “Let’s go, vhenan.”

“Keep your eyes open, Inquisitor!” said Terys. “You never know.”

Sene gave him a lazy look. “I never know what?”

He smirked.

“You’re a shit.”

“Only in the evenings,” he said.

Rasha saw them to the door.

The gazebo was back a ways, a little further than the back house, lit with hanging lanterns in the shapes of pretty birds. You could see the red winter flowers growing up in huge patches. The moonlight made everything seem wet.

“Terys kind of reminds me of me,” said Solas. Sene was heavy against him, and she smelled like booze and some sort of new perfume. “I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.”

“It’s both,” said Sene.

This was funny.

The stars were raining down on their heads. They saw Revasan, inside the gazebo, sitting at a picnic table, uncorking a bottle of brown liquor by the pale glow of an oil lamp. The table was otherwise bare and immaculate. As they approached, Sene cleared her throat. Rev looked up, his brow furrowed, but when he saw her, he softened right away. Solas could sense him holding it back, an old instinct, forged in stone, and it toughened up the air between them like leather. He could tell immediately why their relationship was the way that it was.

“Hey,” she said, smiling with a practiced lack of enthusiasm. They did not embrace.

Revasan took a deep breath. “You’re back,” he said. He smiled, too, albeit his was desperately earnest. Just short lived. He looked down at the table. “It’s good to see you, Sene.”

“You, too,” she said. She went a little limp. She separated from Solas but held onto his hand. “You met Solas?”

Rev looked up, strong again. “Yes,” he said. “He found me on the porch. A good man.”

“Happenstance,” said Solas.

“Sene, would you like to join us?”

“No,” she said. She seemed to know the invitation was simple courtesy. “I need to sleep. My head feels like a tree trunk.”

“Well, it looks okay,” said Revasan.

"Thanks," she said.

She stared him down then, a serious inquiry and a kind of meanness that Solas never really saw outside of battle. It was vulnerable, but defensive, like she might start kicking and screaming. "Dad," she said.

“I’ll see you in the morning," said Revasan. He nodded, once, a reassurance. "Everything is fine. I promise, Sene."

She was suspicious, but at some point, she resigned. "Okay," she said. Then she squeezed Solas’s hand and looked up at him. It was like she was trying to tell him something, too, but there was only static. He kissed her on the forehead. “ _Nydha_ , vhenan,” he said, slipping in and out of the elven again. He’d been doing it all night. He hadn’t spoken it, really spoken it, in some time. They’d used to use it like a bonding mechanism, a way of getting closer, especially in the bedroom. Of course, they no longer needed any mechanism for closeness. Sene and Solas. Now, the language of the People was just language.

Once she was gone, Solas sat down across from Revasan and folded his hands on the table in front of him.

"Sene worries about you," said Revasan. "Very lucky."

"I know."

“I take it you met Rasha,” said Revasan, measuring two neat glasses. “And the rest of the merry band of booze elves. Save for my brother, of course, and Deshanna, who sends his regards. In any case, I hope that they gave you a proper welcome to the farm."

“They did indeed,” said Solas. “Rasha promised to take me on a tour herself tomorrow. She is a very kind woman, very warm.”

“That, she is,” said Revasan. He slid one heavy glass across the table and kept one for himself.

“What are we drinking?” said Solas.

“You like whiskey, I assume.”

“Very much.”

“Have you ever had our whiskey?” said Revasan.

“Only the scotch,” said Solas. He picked up the glass, examined the color. “In a tavern in Kirkwall. Never the bourbon. I prefer bourbon, to be honest. It’s much more common in Ferelden, which is where we get most of our booze back at Skyhold. But there’s no Lavellan bourbon in Ferelden.”

“Not yet,” said Rev.

They touched glasses.

Solas let the whiskey soak his insides. It was very, very smooth. He nodded once.

“So,” said Rev after a moment, spinning the glass in slow circles on the table in front of him, staring down into its caramel depths. "Solas."

“Yes,” said Solas.

“I heard about Kirkwall,” said Rev. “I heard about your heroism there. That you saved many lives in that explosion, and that you ended a rather serious threat on Sene’s life. I wanted to thank you.”

Solas was stoic, but this surprised him. He leaned in on his elbows. “You don’t have to thank me,” he said.

“Yes, I do.” Rev took another drink, flexed his jaw. “I haven’t handled this well,” he went on. “Sene and the Inquisition. It is difficult for me—to understand her place there. Her sudden power. Mages and humans. Everything. She is only twenty years old. I still see her as I always have, and that may be a mistake, but it is what it is. I am never entirely sure these days whether she’ll return at all when she leaves. Every time, the future is a mystery.”

"That's fair," said Solas. He sat back in his chair. "But if we're speaking freely, sir, would it be all right if I asked you a question?"

"It's Revasan," he said. "Not lord. Not sir. And of course."

He nodded in solidarity. "Why are you afraid she won't return?" said Solas. "Revasan. Sene may not be enthusiastic about this place, but she’s never once disowned it. She came back here because, regardless of whether she likes it or not, it is a part of her, and she is drawn here. It is her home. She’s not in denial of that.”

Rev cleared his throat. “This is a difficult clan you’ve entered into, Solas. Sene knows this, but I doubt she lets on half of what is actually real. All that you say, it is terribly romantic, and perhaps true in some regard. I will give you that. But you are not naive. I can tell. You are a man of the world, are you not? That she came back, so soon, and that she brought you, that means something specific.”

“I see.”

“Indeed. Because now, here you are, a man of the world, sitting with me, your girlfriend's father, in his gazebo, behind his house, alone at the end of the night, drinking bourbon."

"You asked me if I'd like to have a drink with you. Of course I said yes."

"And you approached me," said Rev. "This is an old tale, Solas. But you’re a very confident man.”

“Call it confidence,” said Solas. “Or hubris. Either way, you’d be correct.”

This drew a knowing smile. It came and went across Rev’s face like a satellite. “Sharp," he said. "Very sharp. I would expect nothing less. But I must ask. Is there something you’d like to tell me, Solas?” He looked up with a masterful focus.

“Excuse me?”

“What brings you and my daughter back here, in such a hurry?” said Revasan. “I’m sorry to be a cynical bastard, but I know Sene. She said she would be back with you in half a year. It's been what, five weeks? There must be something. This is her home, it’s true, but she does what she wants. She has had one foot out the door since the day she came of age. But now— _now—_ now she wants my approval. Why? She won’t tell me. She tells me nothing. But you, you have something to tell me, don’t you, Solas? There is a reason you’re here.”

Solas took a deep breath. There was a force here that he had not predicted, and that had been foolish. So he finished off his whiskey in a single swallow and poured himself another as a cleansing move to redirect. He leveled up with Revasan, looked him straight in the eye. “I proposed to Sene,” he said. “About a week ago.”

“There it is,” said Revasan.

“We have not told anyone but our closest friends," Solas continued. "Know that I had hoped to wait until after I met you, but the time was right, and so I usurped the opportunity.”

“An interesting choice of words.”

“Please,” said Solas, in seriousness. He held out his hand, like a barter. “I mean no disrespect, Revasan. I know who you are, who your Keeper is, and the nature of this family. I understand what it is that I’m dealing with, granted I’ll admit that I had not anticipated such a direct approach from you, but I miscalculated. That is my mistake, and for that, I apologize. But I asked your daughter to marry me because I love her, and she said yes. I am not sorry for that, and I am not here to ask for your forgiveness or your permission. I am here to tell you, in person, myself, that I intend to marry Sene, and to ask for your blessing and to hopefully earn your trust, as a man.” He took another drink, then he set down the heavy glass. It made a swallowed thud against the soft wood. “That is all.”

They stared at each other. Somewhere in the distance, there were coyotes cackling in frivolity, and the crickets were blinding in the green, nighttime trees. All the lights from the house had gone dim but for one.

Meanwhile, Solas blinked. He was sweating. He saw his entire life flash before his eyes, and he realized that he had never actually been in a situation like this. He had sat across many tables from many different men, all of whom were terrifying in their own unique ways, but he was fearless, and smart, and good at his job, and he always knew exactly who they were and how to get from them exactly what he needed, but never had he ever negotiated anything like this. Something that he wanted. Something personal. He had never had something so personal at stake. Ever.

Revasan finally finished his whiskey. It was a fast move, out of nowhere, like he’d come to some sort of resolve. He then reached into his pocket and produced a small silver case. The case was engraved, a gift from Rasha. _Sule’adahla no gelan rashos. Var lath vir sulde'din. R._ Revasan opened the case. Inside were six perfect joints of elfroot. He offered the case to Solas, who partook without hesitation. Rev then took one for himself and placed the joint between his lips. He struck a match, lit his own, then slid the matchbook across the table. Solas lit the joint and shook the match out till it was dark. The men smoked. They ashed directly onto the table. Revasan refilled their both their glasses. At some point, he put his elbows on the wood, and he was staring down at the wood grain, seeming to count the splinters, and then he began to speak. “May I tell a story?” he said.

Solas felt the smoke, like a purification ritual, cleansing his mind of all things heavy and dark. It was strong shit. “Of course,” he said.

Revasan took a hit, and he then took a drink. The smoke seemed to deepen the lines around his eyes. For just a moment, he looked older than he was. “When my brother and I were about your age,” he said, “perhaps a little younger, we used to dive ruins. Has Sene ever told you that?”

It was the kind of digression that you humor, because it was so fucking out of left field, any recourse to be had would have been overkill. “No, she has not,” said Solas.

“I figured,” said Revasan. He ashed the joint. “She probably remembers very little of it, to be honest. She never came with, only heard the stories, most of which I presented as fiction. Fairy tales. She would have been a child, no older than Kieran.”

“What sort of ruins did you explore?”

“What sort do you think?”

“Elven ruins,” said Solas, releasing the smoke from the corner of his mouth. “That is fascinating.”

“Thank you,” said Rev. “It was fascinating.”

“Where were these ruins.”

“Northern Antiva,” said Revasan. “Nevarra. Rivain. We made several trips to Orlais. We never ventured fully into Tevinter. Ellas wanted to, but he's the idiot one. We did trek the eastern paths of the Hundred Pillars several times.”

“Do you still do it?”

“No.”

“Why did you stop?” said Solas. “If you don’t mind my asking. You're not exactly age of retirement.”

Revasan scratched an itch at his temple. He shrugged. “That is a young man’s pride,” he said. “And a younger man’s game. I learned a great deal, but that time in my life is now over. Ellas and I used to pinpoint these ruins through research, very careful reading, and we’d go to them, just the two of us, and mine their guts. Occasionally, we ran into trouble—demons mostly. Bandits, et cetera. But we were men. There was nothing that scared us. I would bring it all back here to the farm—our findings, as much as I could transport, and I would read. For days, weeks. Dilapidated tomes, scribbles of glyphs and transcriptions of the ancient tongue. Some of it took me years to translate. We never took spoils. That would have been crass.”

“Sene told me a long time ago that you were a historian,” said Solas. “A writer. I figured that meant you kept records of Dalish history, Dalish lore. Not Elvhen.”

“I do that as well,” said Revasan. “As the Archivist for our clan, it is my responsibility to…record our progress, and to put our myths on paper, to be handed down for generations to come.”

“Other than what I know about Sene, I am still learning quite a bit about the Dalish,” said Solas. “But I know that is very important to them. Their progress and their myths.”

“Yes, but Dalish myth is a funny thing," said Rev, picking up the matchbook, pressing it between his fingers. "There are these widespread misconceptions, Solas, that we follow blind into our religion with zero inquiries. That is true for some clans, of course. But most have Archivists for this very reason. We meet, we compare. We revise our beliefs, based on newly discovered truths. Elvhen history is long, as I'm sure you know.”

Solas studied him. He seemed to only half-exist there, shrouded in smoke. “Why are you telling me this?” he said. He put out the joint. He took a drink. “I’m glad that you are. It is very interesting, Revasan, and I'd like nothing more than to continue this discussion. But I fail to see the connection to the matter at hand.”

“Was it you who removed Sene’s vallaslin?” he said, in earnest. “Solas?”

Solas straightened up in his chair. He nodded once. “Yes, it was.”

He expected more cynicism, but Revasan merely nodded along in understanding. “That is what I heard,” he said. “There was talk, in some of the papers. It confused a great deal of Dalish, especially the Orlesian clans, many of whom stick to the old ways very closely. You may know that the Fereldan clans, and the Marcher clans tend to be better off and therefore less suspicious of the human world and religion. In any case, several Keepers came to us, personally, traveled miles, asking for explanation. One of which, of course, we could not provide. We don't speak for Sene.”

“I am aware of all this,” said Solas. “Sene spent a lot of time with Dalish liaisons in the little rooms of Skyhold shortly after it happened, explaining her side of the story. It is my understanding that her choice has been widely embraced as just that—a choice. At least by the clans of Ferelden and Orlais. I am, of course, less familiar with the Free Marches.”

“I understand the politics of what Sene does,” said Revasan, “and I understand why she did it. Like I said before, Sene does what she wants. She does what she believes is right, regardless of the consequences. She is, after everything, true to herself.”

“If you understand her decision, then did you ask simply because you wished for me to tell you the truth?”

“Yes,” said Revasan, taking a hit, emptying his lungs. “Is that so odd?”

“Not at all. I appreciate it, in fact. I’m sure Sene would, too.”

“And I just—I also wanted to ask you, Solas, where you learned that spell.”

“Where I learned it?”

“The removal of the vallaslin,” he went on. He became consumed in his storytelling, lost in a world of words and talking. He continued to smoke and to drink. “In all of my research, Solas, everything I’ve read and translated, whether I discovered it myself, or through another Archivist of an allied clan, I have only come across that particular spell once. _Once._ In thousands and thousands of pages of reading and writing. And it was murky. Terribly old. From a ruin somewhere on the border of Tevinter. It was like—it was a sanctuary, from all that I could gather. A place of rest. Oddly, it was one of the few that Ellas and I stumbled upon by sheer accident.”

“How could you tell that it was a sanctuary?” said Solas.

“There were paintings on the walls that seemed to tell a story of slavery,” said Revasan, “and rebellion. This is not an uncommon theme in the history of our people, as I’m sure you know, Solas, being somewhat of a historian yourself, and so I had completely forgotten about it until just now.” He finished his drink. He poured another. He refilled Solas's glass as well. He was staring back at that wood grain in the table again, searching it for meaning. He finished the joint. He flicked it to his feet. “ _Ar Lasa Mala Revas,”_ he said, looking at Solas. “ _You are free._ That is what it said.”

“That is what what said.”

“These primitive glyphs,” said Revasan, “drawings, like nothing I’ve ever seen, in total disrepair. It was just some fucking ruin. There are a million of them, just like it, especially that close to Tevinter. _Ar Lasa Mala Revas._ And it was accompanied by a tale in pictures. It was the tale of a man who could remove the blood writing. He dressed as a wolf. Or, he came as a wolf. The translation was weird.”

“You speak ancient elven?”

“A great deal,” said Revasan. “Don't you?”

“Of course. But it is a rare talent.”

“Morrigan speaks it as well. Perhaps it is not as rare a talent as you thought." Rev was squeezing his eyes shut.

"No, I'm rather certain it's rare," said Solas. "Just more likely that we keep rare company."

“Anyway," said Revasan, shaking his head. He had completely shredded that matchbook by now. The matches laid out on the table one by one. "As I was saying."

"Right."

 _"Ar lasa mala_ revas," he went on. _"_ That is what it said. The wolf man came, he removed the blood writing, and he offered sanctuary in one of two ways. The first was obvious— _follow_. Follow him to safety. To battle. Whatever. The second was more cryptic. Receive the blood writing of the protector, it said. _Verema vallaslin or’Mythal_.” He looked Solas straight in the eye. “Mythal. That is what it said. They were in league with one another, this wolf man and the All-Mother. Either way, according to the elves who put it there, it meant that they were free.”

A soft wind blew through the gazebo. A set of wind chimes came to life somewhere back at the house. Solas studied Revasan in the strange yellow light from the lantern on the table. “A wolf man.”

“I took it to mean Fen’Harel,” said Revasan, shrugging. “Obviously. I couldn’t make heads or tails of the myth back then. But I’ve never come across that spell again, and yet I've come across enough mixed interpretations of Fen'Harel over the years, that his identity has become a mystery. I’m starting to put the pieces together. Surely you know our clan is rather liberal, in terms of religion. It’s less worship, more practice. Values and such.”

“Revasan," said Solas, shaking his head. "These discoveries are remarkable."

“I know," said Rev. He scratched an ear, smoked. "But I don't know everything. Whatever kind of rebel he was—Fen’Harel—I have no idea. I actually wondered if you knew.” He looked up.

Solas raised his eyebrows. “If I knew what?”

“You know the spell,” said Revasan. “Morrigan says you're a dreamer. That you can walk in the Fade without lyrium. That you control the Veil. I look at you now, I see a big elven mage from a far away land with a missing history. At least that’s what the papers say.”

“You of all people should know better than to trust ink on paper alone.”

“That is why I am asking you myself.”

“Would you like to know the truth, which feels like a lie?” said Solas. “Or a lie that feels true?”

“Is this a riddle? I’d like the truth. You know that by now. Where did you learn the spell?” he said. He narrowed his eyes, but he was not accusing. “Are you an ancient elf, Solas? I know they run in the wild yet. I know about the Sentinels of Mythal. Sene told us all of this, including more information pertaining to the Dread Wolf—all of which further confuses and yet somehow solidifies my suspicions. Her letters this past year held all the charm of a business transaction, sort of like it always is with her, but she wrote us plenty.”

“A business transaction? I helped her with those letters. You’re exaggerating.”

“Where did you learn the spell?”

“Where did I learn the spell?” said Solas.

"Yes."

"I invented the spell."

Revasan balked, but only by half. He was deeply intrigued. “Excuse me?”

“I invented it,” said Solas. “You said you wanted the truth, not a lie that sounds true. The spell that removes the vallaslin, it is mine. I am Fen'Harel."

Revasan just stared at him. "You are not," he said. "Are you?"

“I’ve no way of recalling the many murals painted in my honor, Revasan," said Solas, his head in his hands. "I know that they existed, and I know that some still do. Murals, statues. That was the nature of my work. And you seem perfectly clear, on all of this. You have an elegant mind, easily filled with solid truths, and your name clearly does not belie your league of thinking. Try not to let something so foolish as common sense cloud your freedom of thought now. Surely you know, especially if you do believe what Sene told you about the Temple of Mythal, that the Dalish myths surrounding Fen’Harel are lies. Or, to use more delicate terms, truths eclipsed by thousands of years and lingering propaganda—none of which they had the luxury of knowing at the time, by the way, so know that I do not blame them. Or, you. Whatever. There were a lot of mad elves in the end. They did not know all that happened. They were angry." He closed his eyes.

"Solas. Are you all right?"

"I am fine," said Solas, mostly ignoring him now, shaking his head. He blinked, hard. The edges of his vision were blurred. He was extraordinarily high. "Sometimes, the old mind plays tricks," he continued, in part to himself. Clarity came and went. "I only just got mine back. That is thanks to your daughter, by the way. These excavations into the past, they have a way of shredding me, I'll admit. So I’ll take my leave of talking for the moment and let you do the rest. Do you understand?” He looked up.

“Yes," said Revasan, leaning toward him. “I understand." He seemed fascinated and satisfied. It was very strange. "You are Fen'Harel? What does that mean?"

Solas put his head down on the table. It was an old habit of exasperation and defeat. But the whiskey and the elfroot and the conversation, the exhaustion from the trip—it was getting into his skull and filling it with memories and weight and smoke. He could not believe what had just happened. “I’m just Solas,” he said, closing his eyes. “I always was. Everything else is a very long story from a very long time ago that I would love to tell you another day when I’m not so…tired. For now, I am just Solas. I’m Solas, and I am going to marry your daughter, who already knows all of this, by the way, and all I wanted tonight was the blessing of her father, who is apparently the smartest elf in all Thedas, and I did not know. I promise I did not know.”

“I thought you said you knew what you were dealing with.”

“Yes,” said Solas. “Businessmen. Smart, sure. But not this. We should recruit you to the fucking Inquisition. Ruin diving and comparative history? Relic analysis? Glyph-reading? She did not tell me you spoke the old language.”

“Do you know how smart you have to be to succeed as a Dalish elf in this fucking reality, Solas? What do you think Sene was doing at that Conclave to begin with? Serving tea and pastries? Do you think that was random?”

“Of course not.”

“Then what did you think?”

“It’s not that I underestimated your intelligence, Revasan,” said Solas, “but Sene—she exaggerates. She makes you out to be this rash, a stoic asshole with a stick up his ass. That part, I’d prepared for, and I suppose that it, in the end, is not an altogether inaccurate assessment. It's simply incomplete. How is this actually happening?”

“A stoic asshole with a stick up his ass?”

Solas turned his head so he could see Rev’s face. He nodded. “I am sorry. Please know that _stoic_ is my word, obviously. Sene would never say _stoic_.”

“Right,” said Revasan, shaking his head, putting his chin in his hands. “But she would bring home the Dread Wolf ,who she intends to marry. How am I not more surprised?"

“The Dread Wolf is not real.”

Rev waved him off. “Whatever.”

“Whatever?”

“We need to talk,” he said. He flipped another joint from the little silver case. He lit it with a match very quick and practiced. He was a goddam chain smoker. “You and me. We need to talk.”

“Fine,” said Solas. “I am amenable to talking. In the future. But first, will you please answer my question from before.”

Rev gave him a look. “What?”

Solas picked up his head. He looked Revasan straight in the eye. “The reason I came here,” he said. “Will you give us your blessing?”

“Oh,” said Rev. He thought on it, seemed to mull it over as he smoked, and then he fanned the smoke out of the air between them. “I wish you would have waited to meet me first.”

“I understand that.”

“You've saved her life,” said Revasan. His eyes were a maniacal blue in the lamp light. “Many times. She loves you. You’ll continue to protect her.”

Solas sighed. “Yes. All of that, yes.”

“And we’ll talk. You and me. This is in confidence, our discussion, until we decide otherwise.”

“Of course _._ ”

“Good,” said Revasan. He smiled. It was so fast. Like a fucking carousel with these people. In any case, he held out his hand. “Very well.”

“Very well what?”

“Shake my hand."

Solas obeyed.

“You have my blessing, Solas,” said Revasan, man to man, still smoking in the moonlit gazebo. “And my approval. Marry Sene. We'll pay for the whole thing if you'd like. We'll be there and welcome you to the family with gusto. Are you satisfied?”

Solas looked him in the eye as he shook his hand. He felt like he’d been hit by a steam locomotive. “Yes," he said.

"Good. Then we can call it a night."

Solas sighed. The handshake fell away, and he rested his heavy head back in his hands. "I need to ask you one more question.”

“Anything,” said Revasan.

He looked up. “You just dropped half a bottle of whiskey and you have not stopped smoking since the moment we got here. How are you doing this?”

Rev smirked. “Feeling a little worse for the liquor, friend? You’ll get used to it.”

“Did you drug me?”

“Don't be ridiculous. I'm not a savage. Plus, we don’t do drugs in Clan Lavellan, Solas. That would be wrong.” He got up from the table, dusted his hands off on his old blue slacks. He went down the stairs to the yard. “You should get back to Sene,” he said. “Don’t fall asleep out here. You’ll get bug bites.”

“Thank you for the advice,” said Solas.

They walked back to the house together, each of them with their hands in their pockets.

“I would have thought an ancient elf like you could hold his liquor, to be honest,” said Rev.

Solas gave him a look. “Do you see me on my hands and knees? It was the elfroot. What is it?”

Rev took out the silver case, examined it in his palm. “Artisanal,” he said. “There’s a small batch supplier of Dalish elfroot nearby. Personal friends of mine. They're trying out something new with this one, and I got first claim. Don't tell Terys.”

“Dalish elfroot farmers?”

“Why not?” said Revasan. Now, they were in the kitchen. He lit a lantern and poured Solas a glass of water from a pitcher by the stove. He did not pour one for himself. He handed it to Solas and clapped a hand to his shoulder. “Be nice to my daughter,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Indeed."

“Oh. Do you know how to make pancakes?” said Revasan as he left the kitchen.

“Pancakes?” said Solas. “I believe so. Why?”

“Sene likes pancakes,” said Revasan. "So does Rasha."

"They do?"

Rev smiled. "The men make breakfast on Saturdays," he said. "Would you like to join us?"

Solas felt that he could no longer tell reality from construction. He could not tell if it was merely the drug, or Revasan, or both. He shook out his head. "Of course," he said.

"Very good," said Rev. The kitchen reeked of elfroot. He took off his jacket, tossed it to the coat rack, and he gave Solas a quick but lazy salute. Then, he went into the dark hall, entered the room at the very end, and was gone. Solas leaned into the table, hard.

 

Meanwhile, Morrigan had been unable to sleep that night, in the back house. Revasan’s voice carried, and she was wired anyway. She had heard much of the conversation while she sat at her window, knitting a quilt. She had only just started. It was blue, many variations, with patterns of stars and red hearts. She had cried upon hearing Solas say that he had proposed. It was true. The emotion flooded her heart like one of the hurricanes of her youth, when she and her mother would venture to the sea to leave offerings to the spirits of the storm, and afterward, they would take shelter on the high ground, beneath a great outcropping of limestone that Flemeth had nicknamed _the Pirate Ship_ , because it was big and it was black and it was shaped like sails. Morrigan remembered holding on for dear life as the storm raged off the sandy shore, and her mother told stories of her teenage youth.

 _When I was your age,_ she said once to Morrigan, _women did not marry for love. They married for protection._

Morrigan surveyed her mother. The sudden strangeness in her voice. She felt the wisdom already growing strong in her bones. She was eighteen. _Perhaps that is why men leave,_ she said. _Could it be true?_

Flemeth said nothing. She looked away. She looked into the eye of the storm and bid it farewell forever as it died in the sky.

Morrigan knitted all through the night and into the morning until finally she dragged herself into bed and stayed there. She had finished the quilt and folded it into quarters and wrapped it in a big, fat red ribbon and even wrote a note: _Sule’din,_ was all it said. Persistence. Endurance. A love to weather the storm. If they were getting married, then Sene and Solas would need a housewarming gift, and if life had taught Morrigan any graces at all, this was it.

Even still, as the sun came up that day, and she could hear the birds and the sounds of men in the fields, Morrigan drifted into a foggy sleep and she wondered idly if Sene would ask her to be in the wedding. If that was the sort of thing that woman friends did. Was that so awkward? Perhaps it was. But there was a light inside Morrigan now, a new freedom, and she would no longer deny herself this small piece of happiness that she had earned. Plus, it was Saturday, thought Morrigan as she disappeared into dreaming in the blue dawn sky. Saturday on the Lavellan farm meant pancakes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Elven Translations:
> 
> "Nydha, vhenan." - "Goodnight, vhenan."
> 
> "Sule’adahla no gelan rashos i'na. Var lath vir sulde'din." - "Into the woods, I fear no darkness when I am with you. Our love shall persevere."
> 
> <3


	57. Oaths

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Part one of two.

He stood in the steeples of the Fade. He was alone here. The landscape of his childhood was pink. In the Weathers, light had always poured down like huge bubbles, especially when he was a kid. But that was just an idea. Now, here and now in this haunted prison, when the bubbles hit the grass, they were real. They’d burst, spill the sun all into the earth as a glowing chemical, making stains there. Arlathan on the horizon behind him was like a massive, glowing star field. He could feel it, humming, burning the skin on the back of his neck. _This is the future,_ thought Solas, but the thought itself had all the chimeric integrity of a memory. He put it away.

He approached the cottage. The place he grew up. It came and went, flashes of dilapidation and yellowed bricks. At times, it was lovely and pure. At other times, it was rundown, the shutters hung at odd angles, a black mold developing at the roots of the door. Solas heard her, laughing. He looked around, but couldn’t see. He hadn’t been here in thousands of years. The wind was cruel and whistled with sand and grit that stung his eyeballs.

He stopped just at the edge of the yard, right outside the peeling, white fence.

That is when the front door swung open. She came outside. She was nine years old. She had long, blond hair that went past her waist. She wore a blue plaid skirt.

 _Bye, Solas,_ she called back into the house. Then she got onto a silver bicycle and rode down the walk. She rode until she saw him, and then she rode right up to him. She stopped. She looked around, confused.

“ _Ane amem_ ,” said Solas. He shoved his hands in his pockets. It was his oath, his peace offering. “Do not fear me.”

But she did not seem to fear him. She also did not know him anymore. He didn’t know how he must have appeared here. He had forgotten the math of what was. “Who are you?” she said.

“I am the carpenter,” he said. “I live down the lane. I’m here to fix the shutters.”

She looked back at the house, then back at Solas. “Carpenter?”

“That’s right.”

“Does Marin know?”

This made him smile. He lost his guts through his teeth. “Probably not,” he said.

She looked at his hands where they rested in his pockets. She wore a blue ribbon in her hair. “I can go get him,” she said.

“That’s okay,” he said. “I’ll do it myself.”

And just like that, she seemed to trust him. “I’m Ghil,” she said. She held out her hand. “I live up the dirt road. This is my best friend’s house.”

He shook her hand. He was very calm. “It is nice to see you, Ghil.” He put his hands back in his pockets, and he looked back at the house, squinting against the pink sun. “Which part hurts the most?” he said next. “Tell me, okay?”

She was quiet. Her breathing steady. She had her hands on the handlebars. The little ribbons floating in the breeze. “The hinges on the door,” she said, like a secret. She knew what to say, even if she didn't know why. “I can feel them. Squeaking.” She covered her ears.

He looked at her. “I will fix them,” he whispered.

“Thank you,” she said.

Then for just for a moment, she was a different Ghil. Grown-up and barefaced, twenty-nine years old, and they were smoking up on the roof at Skyhold. Only it was not called Skyhold back then. It was called _Terasyl'nin Morla._ Castle of Storms. The translation had gotten muddled over the years. It became _Tarasyl'an_ , which became _Terasyl'an Telas._ Place Where the Sky is Held. Skyhold. It was a mistake. An accident. That castle had been for Mythal. He had built it for her, for them. A hideaway. And yet, he did not even know if she remembered, that old name. Time had stolen so much. He should have told Sene this, wanted to tell Sene, but he only just remembered. It was a shock. He lost track of what was real, but it was momentary. It was a process that his brain had finally learned. He could handle this. He knew everything, the ups from the downs. He could make his way back, because he’d done it before, and he knew he could. He shook his head out, like a man. Back in the Weathers, Ghil was riding away on her bike, up the dirt road, without waving goodbye. He watched her go and felt a quiet pain releasing in his chest. It was over.

He closed his eyes. It was the end of the line. Something hissed in his bones, and he saw numbers. An endless barrage like a ticker tape parade. He snapped his fingers. He oiled the hinges so that it all snapped back into place. The house, the sky. It was right again. No more bubbles of dirty sunlight poisoning the lawn. He took a deep breath and he regarded his work with a serious tenacity. 

But then, he heard a voice. It was a light voice, sort of strong. It was Sene’s voice. He looked around, and there she was. He wanted to tell her what had happened.

But they were in Crestwood now, by the pool where he had removed her vallaslin. She was smiling, but she looked a little worried.

“You found me,” he said.

“I think someone’s knocking,” she said. Overhead, there was a huge redtail. It was flying everywhere. “When did that get here?”

“Who’s knocking?”

“On the door,” she said.

“I know that part. Who is it?”

“I think it’s my fucking dad,” said Sene, still watching the redtail. She had her hands behind her back. But when she presented them, she had a small, gold ring on her left ring finger. It really was the future. “Motherfucker.”

“Answer it,” he said. “Don’t keep him waiting. He’ll eat me alive.”

“I don’t want to.”

“This is not my house, Sene. I cannot answer the door for you.”

“This is the Fade, Solas,” said Sene. “Come on.”

The irony was enough to jack him out of the depths. He laughed and heard the knocking, for real this time. He heard two voices. “You’re very pretty when you’re tall.”

“I’m always tall,” she said.

He smirked, because he already knew that.

 

He woke up. He sat straight up. Sene was sitting in the bed beside him, rubbing her eyes, and now she was staring.

“Are you okay?” she said.

Her hair was huge. It was like a huge nest with birds inside. He reached out and touched it. She didn’t even notice. There really was knocking, but there were no birds. “Yes.”

“Who is it?” she shouted at the door, finally.

“Send out your fiance,” said Revasan.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

She looked at Solas. “No.”

“Time for pancakes.” He knocked two more times. And then he left.

Sene was confused. Solas pressed his palms into his forehead and groaned. His brain felt like acid pumping through a drum. "Pancakes."

“What’s going on?” she said.

“Nothing.” He looked right at her. “I’m hungover.”

“I can see that," she said. "He knows we’re engaged?”

Solas glanced out the window, entirely beat. “That, and many more things.”

“But I thought—why are you looking at me like that?”

“Why didn’t you tell me your father was such a psychopath?”

“What?”

“Sorry,” said Solas. “Perhaps _psychopath_ is a tad extreme. You can tell I’m exaggerating. Still.”

“What did he say to you?”

“It was more what he manipulated me into saying to him.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve never been outsmarted at the table like that before,” said Solas, with his face in his hands. “It was like my manhood, excised and handed back to me on a silver platter. I’m still not entirely sure what happened. Though I did get us his blessing, as you can tell.”

“He’s not mad?”

Solas smirked. It was a tired smirk, but it was still a smirk. “He was pissed off that I did not wait to run it by him before I asked you. That is old fashioned, even for me. In any case, he forgave my trespass.”

“So that’s it?” said Sene. “That’s everything? We’re good?”

“I supposed,” said Solas. “However, he also knows I’m Fen’Harel.”

Sene was horrified. “Are you fucking with me?”

“No,” said Solas, still caught in his own surprise. He was just shaking his head, over and over. “Not at all. He told me he used to dive ruins. With your uncle? Did you know he speaks ancient elven? He’s been to one of my old sanctuaries. He saw the spell I did to remove your vallaslin. It was painted on a wall, like a mural, somewhere in the mountains east of Tevinter. He put it together and asked me about it, directly, and I could not lie. He’s your father.”

She was just staring at him. “I knew about the ancient elven. I didn’t think it was a thing.”

“Well, it is,” said Solas. “In any case, it came out, and he believed me. He was fascinated. Hence, psychopath. I think it made him like me more, actually, realizing I was this depraved figurehead from your Dalish folklore, which he eschews, by the way.” He dug a fist into his eye.

“You’re not depraved,” said Sene, making him stop. “Did he call you depraved?”

“No,” said Solas. “His mind is so clean, so entitled to truth. I’ve never met anyone like that before.” He looked at her. He took a deep breath. He smiled easy. “Except maybe you.”

“Shh.” She punched him in the shoulder.

He tipped over into the bed sheets. “Ouch.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, petting his ear. “I just can’t believe he knows.” She hopped over him and got out of bed. Oddly chipper. She put on a new shirt and a pair of blue linen pants he’d never seen before. “Fuck.” She fluffed her hair in the mirror. She was going about all of this incredibly fast. He’d never really watched her like this before, inside of herself as she got ready for the day. Not in the home setting, at least. They were either at Skyhold and sleeping until noon, lazying into the day one piece of clothing at a time, or they were in the field somewhere, sleeping in tents, and there were no mirrors, and he fluffed her hair for her. It was fascinating, this discovery. Like meeting a whole new animal. She looked at him. “What?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I have to go. I have to go be a man and make pancakes.”

“Do you even know how to make pancakes?”

“Of course. What kind of person do you think I am?”

“Are you going to do magic?” she said.

“No,” he said. “Do not worry, Sene. You’ve met my mother. We made our own pancakes when I was growing up. We did not magic them out of thin air. That said, it’s still been a while.”

She went to him, where he sat on the edge of the bed. She pressed her palms to his cheeks and kissed him on the lips. “It’s all gonna be okay,” she said.

He smiled, touching his lips to her forehead. She tasted like Sene. Like freckles and memories. “Thank you, vhenan.”

“If he told you all that stuff,” said Sene, “about the ruins and everything, he must like you.”

“Is that important to you?”

“Of course not.”

“It’s okay if it is, vhenan.”

“I just—I don’t want him to hate you. I don’t want anyone to hate you.”

“I agree,” said Solas. “In any case, I do believe he trusts me. That part did not take much. He seems to have read up on our business with the Inquisition. He knew about Kirkwall and the assassins. He thanked me for saving your life. I also believe he said they’d pay for the whole wedding, if we wanted.”

“That is not happening."

“I know,” he said. “It was still a nice gesture.”

“Maybe,” said Sene. She got quiet, and then she looked at him like she sensed something small, some small change inside him, inside his heart. “You were talking in your sleep this morning,” she said. “Really early.”

“I was?” he said.

She nodded. “You haven’t done that in a while. It was about Ghilan’nain, I think? Ghil?”

Solas took a deep breath. He searched her, but she was merely curious. He put the hair behind her ear. “I did a few repairs while I was in the Fade last night,” he said. “One of them was to the place where she is kept. That is probably why.”

“Is it like a prison?” said Sene.

He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I mean, that’s exactly what it is, but it is not _like_ a prison, not to her. It’s just a memory, on a loop that plays forever. No suffering.”

“Because you couldn’t bear to hurt her?” said Sene. She was so earnest. “I know we don't have time to really talk about it, but is that why?”

He swallowed some air, nodded once. “It was coming apart, Sene, the illusion, thanks to the Breach. It probably did hurt for a little while. But I fixed it.”

Sene was very far outside her league of understanding, but he could sense the trust and vibrations in her heart. She just nodded. “Okay.”

He kissed her.

There was another knock on the door then, abrupt, jerking them back to reality. They both turned to look. “What?” said Sene. Like the cracking of a whip.

You could hear voices in the kitchen now. More Lavellans. It was Terys this time. “Come _out,_ ” he said.

“Go away,” said Sene.

He cracked the door. “Can I come in?”

“No.”

He poked his freckled face in anyway. His eyes were closed. “Good morning, elves.”

“You can open your eyes,” said Solas.

“I’m good,” said Terys. “But hey, Deshanna is here, and he’s in a good mood. So. That.”

“Awesome,” said Sene. She dropped and flattened out on the floor like a great big rug. “I don’t want to.”

“Quit whining,” said Terys. He opened his eyes then, big and blue, one at a time. He looked at Solas. “Is she always such a whiner?”

“Very well.” Solas got out of bed and picked up Sene by the shoulders, set her on her feet. “Time to face the music, vhenan. I need to get dressed.”

“I order you not to,” she said. "As Inquisitor.”

Solas smirked. “Here, you’re not the Inquisitor. You're just Sene. I refuse.”

She sighed, exasperated.

Solas went to the bureau, threw a gray cotton shirt over his head. Meanwhile, Terys hung out in the doorway. He was staring, in light awe, like he couldn’t figure something out. He cleared his throat.

“Is there something I can help you with?” said Solas.

“I was just—” He shrugged. “How tall are you, exactly?”

“Uh,” said Solas, looking at Sene, then looking down at his feet as if that might clarify things. “About six feet and four inches? On a good day.”

Terys was impressed. He looked at Sene. “Same as Deshanna.” Then he looked back at Solas. “Hey, can you make fireworks?”

“Get out.” She shoved him into the hall and slammed the door. They could hear him laughing all the way back to the kitchen. Solas was laughing as well. But Sene was doomed. She had her hands on her head, and she was squeezing her hair and closing her eyes.

“I _can_ make fireworks,” said Solas. Then, he softened. “Vhenan, what’s the matter?”

“I miss Skyhold,” she said, shaking her head. Her hair was everywhere.

“You are not usually this high strung.”

“That’s because at Skyhold, I get guards,” said Sene. “Posted to my door. Guards. They make things easier. Where are my guards, Solas? And when did I become so dramatic and dependent on guards?”

Solas went to her. He tugged her into him, firm, so that he could feel her breath on his neck. She liked to feel small sometimes, when life’s sharper edges were up against her. He knew this. She was tall, but he was much taller. It was, ahead of many things, some part of why he had appealed to her in the first place. “You’re doing fine without your guards,” he said. “Nothing’s perfect. And if you want, we can look at this like Cullen’s markers on the war table. Just like Skyhold.”

“What?”

“Your mother pinched my cheek,” he continued, “and despite the fact that I inadvertently got both drunk and very high last night and confessed to your father that I am the _Dread_ Wolf, I somehow ended up with his approval. We’ve only been here for twelve hours, Sene, and somehow, I think we’re winning.”

She looked up at him like he was crazy, but then she smiled in spite of herself. “Maybe."

 

In the kitchen, Revasan ordered his wife back into the gazebo.

“No women inside,” he said as he tied the apron around his waist. The kitchen was extra blue that morning. It was a cloudy day. He smiled in a way that surprised her and brought her awake, turning her insides to mush.

“I’d like a drink,” she said.

“Coming right up.”

Outside, it looked like rain. Deshanna had said it would hold off till the afternoon—he was pretty good at predicting the weather, but he was also optimistic. He was in the pantry out back now, bringing in a bag of flour. Meanwhile, the women were in the gazebo and the blue birds were out on the porch steps, singing and picking at the seeds in the feeder and sending forth the day like an anthem. The Lavellan farm was kinetic, but Saturday mornings were a time of rest, for everyone. One hundred booze elves, partaking in this tradition of pancakes.

Terys came back from the hall, hair rumpled. “What are you doing in here, Aunt Rasha?”

“I’m leaving,” she said, giving him a look. She turned to Revasan as he poured her a crystal flute of champagne. “Did you tell Solas?”

“I did." He handed her the flute. “He should be out the moment he gets his head on straight.”

“Real soon,” said Terys. "He's like—it'll be soon." He started putting on his own apron. He checked his reflection in the glass of the window, then he washed his hands.

Ellas was out back, gathering eggs off the chickens. The house was quiet for a moment.

Rasha took a sip of her champagne. Her cheeks were pink. “I suppose you poisoned him last night."

“Only with knowledge,” said Revasan.

“I found the poor boy asleep with his head on the kitchen table. He reeked of your artisanal drugs.”

“He is a man,” said Revasan, loudly. A declaration. “Not a boy. He can handle himself. If he fell asleep in the kitchen, that was exactly what he intended to do. Trust me, vhenan.”

He raised his own glass then, to her. She obliged, apples in her cheeks. Big warm welcome signals that said no matter what, she would do just that.

 

Outside, Yara was in the gazebo with Morrigan and Fisara. They all sat around the table with their feet up, metaphorically. Yara had spiked her orange juice with a dose of vanilla liqueur—just a dose—and she had a pile of knitting in her lap. The rest were drinking heartily. Morrigan looked tired but alive, and Kieran was sitting on the table with his legs swinging back and forth.

“You’d better get inside, young man,” said Rasha.

“Is Solas awake yet? And the Inquisitor?” said Kieran.

“I think just about,” said Rasha.

Kieran looked at his mother.

“Go on,” said Morrigan.

“I’ll put huckleberries in yours, mother. They’re your favorite.”

Morrigan blushed. “There are no huckleberries in the Free Marches, Kieran. You know this.”

“Well, then blueberries.” He hopped off the table. “You like those, too.” He disappeared toward the house.

“That kid,” said Fisara, peeling a green apple with a pocket knife. She had sort of a husky voice and an angled face. She was pretty in a hard, old-fashioned way, fifty-eight years old, and Deshanna’s second wife. “He’s like an oddity. How did you raise him so darling?”

“It’s the castle air,” said Yara, knitting. She was so delicately pregnant. You could tell only in small ways. “Skyhold, is it?”

“Skyhold is less a castle, and more a glorified fortress with expensive heraldry,” said Morrigan. “Sene would tell you the same. But prior to my work with the Inquisition, Kieran and I spent five years living in the Winter Palace of Halamshiral. That will groom any young man in ways that are both convincing and tiresome.” She sipped her champagne.

“Well, it sounds glamorous,” said Yara.

“It was, indeed.”

Rasha sat down. She plumped her hair, held her champagne. “Sene should be out soon.”

“Thank the gods,” said Fisara. “I need to meet this man named Solas.”

“He will be inside,” said Rasha. “With the other men. But I can assure that he is a charming specimen. You'll like him, Fisara.”

“Does Sene still keep her hair long?” said Fisara, taking a loud bite from the apple. “I’m still pissed off that I missed her last time.”

“Yes, she does,” said Rasha. “In fact, it’s more feral than ever.”

“So strange,” said Yara. “I would have thought she’d cut the whole thing off, the way she used to braid it so tightly to her skull. Then again, romance changes a woman.”

“Tell us about him, Morrigan,” said Fisara, leaning in on her elbows. She was a lanky creature. Her eyes were gray, and she was weathered in her cheeks. She got a lot of sun. “This great big elf that Ise brought home.”

Morrigan swallowed the last of her champagne and sighed. Rasha handed her the bottle. Somewhere on the other side of the trees, there were the sounds of children. Bubbles would pass through the foliage on occasion and pop along the grass. The day was oddly warm, but that was the moisture in the air.

“He is arrogant,” said Morrigan.

“Well, that figures,” said Fisara.

“I am—thankful for how he’s taken to Kieran,” she went on. “That much is true. And at the end of the day, he is highly intelligent and attentive to Sene. He’s a very good leader and a powerful mage and a strong warrior in the field. In truth, I detested him at the outset. He is a bit of a hothead, and it was something about his preoccupation with being right. But that was as much my own narrow-minded ignorance as it was his.”

Fisara took another bite of her apple. She cut off a chunk and dropped it into her champagne, like a garnish. “You are the most well-spoken woman I’ve ever met,” she said.

“Why, thank you,” said Morrigan.

“But now, give me the goods—what does he look like?"

Morrigan raised her eyebrows. She folded her hands in her lap, all business. “He is...rather hunky,” she said. “Tall with broad shoulders. A strong jawline. Handsome. Bald as a cue ball.”

“Bald?” said Fisara. She looked at Yara. “Bald?”

“Indeed,” said Yara reaching into the bowl of salted almonds at the center of the table. There was also a silver tray of winter citrus and a pot of coffee arranged on a porcelain plate. “But you’ve never met a bald man like Solas.”

“How?” said Fisara.

“He’s sort of…it suits him. Perhaps it is the ancient thing.”

"Right," said Fisara, pensive. "Right. That is a _thing_ to consider."

“Please stop gossiping,” said Rasha, outright. “This man is to become my son-in-law.”

“They’re engaged?” said Fisara. "Why didn't Rev mention that this morning?"

"He did," said Rasha. "You were late."

Fisara smiled with her wide, secretive mouth. She was a woman of knowing. “How’d Rev take it.”

“Fine,” said Rasha, folding her hands in her lap. “But he used little mercy, as one would expect.”

“Poor Solas.”

“He is a brave man,” said Rasha. “Around two this morning I came out to the kitchen for a glass of water and found him passed out cold with his head flat on the kitchen table. He did make it to bed after that, albeit not without my help.”

Yara laughed. “Brave man indeed.”

“Did you know, Morrigan?” said Fisara. “About the engagement? Before today?”

Morrigan was not really listening. “I dreamed they were married,” she said, looking up, whimsical. “Sometimes, my dreams bear truth in the vein of Sene and Solas. It was a beautiful ceremony, on a beach somewhere.” There were lights strung up on the ceiling of the gazebo. They were broken and had not worked in some time.

“I wonder how soon she’ll get pregnant,” said Yara.

"Knowing Sene?” said Fisara. “Sooner than we think, but it will come as a shock, especially to her.”

“Whatever her choice, it is the right choice,” said Rasha.

“You’re the most giving woman at the table,” said Fisara. She glanced to Morrigan. “Though I don’t know _you_ that well yet, Lady Morrigan. Would you call yourself a giving woman?”

“Never before now,” said Morrigan, studying her nails. They were clear. She was upright and never easily offended. It was the only reason she could get on with the Lavellan women the way she did. A bunch of tough cookies. She took another drink of champagne and felt the bubbles go straight to her brain. “But this past year has changed me in ways that are difficult to describe.”

“Could you try?” said Fisara. She bit into her apple.

Morrigan gave her a look. Only Rasha knew the story of Matthew, and of Flemeth at all. They had bonded that past month, it was true. “I could,” she said to Fisara, crossing her arms over her chest. “But I’m certain any explanation I could provide in the space of breakfast champagne would only serve to dissatisfy you.”

Fisara smirked. She finished her apple and tossed the core to the weeds.

Sene appeared then, wearing a pretty gray blouse with silver buttons. She plopped into the chair between Morrigan and her mother and dropped her head back dramatically.

“Wine, my dear?” said Fisara.

“Yes, please,” said Sene.

“How are you this morning?” said Rasha.

“Good,” said Sene. She picked up her head as Fisara handed her a flute of champagne. “Thank you.” She turned back to her mother. “Were you in my room last night?”

“Solas was worse for the drugs,” she said. “He fell asleep in the kitchen. I gave him a hand.”

“In the kitchen?”

“Yes, well. You know your father.”

“We hear best wishes are in order,” said Yara, looking up from her knitting. She seemed to be making something for the baby. Baby socks or baby slippers. They were bright red. “Why didn’t you tell us last night?”

“Excuse me?”

“The wedding,” she said. She smiled in earnest.

"Congratulations, Ise,” said Fisara.

“I just—” She looked at Morrigan, who looked suspicious. “Did you know?”

“How would I know?” said Morrigan.

“Because like all the other mages I know, you have a habit of reading my mind.”

“I cannot read minds,” she said. “But I did have an inkling. It was correct, as many of my inklings tend to be.” She nodded and held out her glass. Sene touched it with her own on an instinct. Morrigan drank and then demurred. “I am very happy for you, Inquisitor.”

Sene blushed.

“Your father called an early morning meeting to discuss it,” said Rasha. She squeezed Sene’s hand, quickly. “Just the inner circle. Everybody is happy. This is good news.”

“Thanks,” said Sene. She was embarrassed by the attention, and a little worried. She wished for the moment to end.

“When are you getting married?” said Yara.

“When?”

“Yes, when.”

Sene shook out her brain, searched her head. “We talked about next summer.”

“A long engagement,” said Fisara.

“Not that long,” said Sene. “We’ve only been together for a year, and it’s been an abnormally…difficult year. Is that strange? To wait so long?”

“No,” said Rasha.

“Deshanna and I didn’t get married till we were together for five years,” said Fisara. “Then again, we were old timers. Lots of baggage.”

“You’re not an old timer,” said Sene.

“I always liked you best, Ise. You speak from your heart.”

Sene paused. She ran a finger around the rim of her glass. She was a little hungover from the night before and very hungry. “I try.”

“What’s the matter?” said Rasha.

“Nothing,” said Sene. “It’s nothing. I just—he called a meeting?”

Fisara reached out a hand then, put it on Sene’s wrist. She was a strong woman, full of feelings, and she knew how to speak when others couldn't. A matriarch. But it was all underneath a lot of bark. She seemed made of bones and hale, hard armor for skin. You could not hurt her anymore. Not really. “He was excited,” she said, very quiet. Like a private moment between them. “In his way. You know your father. Always _stomp stomp, hiding my feelings for fun._ "

"He does the world many favors," said Rasha. "But feelings are not one of them."

"I know that," said Fisara. "But what I'm saying is, he was happy, Sene. He wanted to share that he gave your suitor his blessing.”

“He did?” said Sene.

“Yes,” she said. “And I know that you're really worried about my husband. About what Deshanna will say. Your father can bless your suitor but it is Deshanna who decides whether your marriage will be acknowledged by the clan."

“No,” said Sene. She sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe. I just hate everyone talking about us. Can’t we just be?”

“Modest girl,” said Fisara, reading the subtext. “He will bless your marriage. He is happy for you. And we will all let you be.”

Sene nodded. "If you say so."

“You are welcome.”

Yara cleared her throat then, held up the knitting from her lap. The little red booties were almost done.

“Yes?” said Sene.

“I just—” she went on. She was self-conscious now.

“What?”

“I understand you’re not wanting to belabor the issue of your marriage, Isene,” she said, serious, studying her knitting. “It is, in the long run, no more exciting and new than breathing air. It’s just the motion of living, is it not?”

“I guess,” said Sene.

“And that you have no desire to let it rule you, that is admirable. Especially for such a young woman. Granted, you are anything but typical. But I was wondering something, and I have been wondering since last night, and it is about Solas, but I swear it has nothing to do with your wedding.”

“It’s okay,” said Sene.

Yara took a deep breath, rested her hands on her stomach. “That long scar, in his temple,” she said, tracing a finger from her hair line down to the lobe of her ear. She was very concerned. Yara was a trained healer, an herbalist, and healers get concerned about things like long scars. “I noticed it right away. How did he come by such a nasty bit of work? He has a couple on his face, I noticed. But they’re old. Rev was very clear, that he is one of the People, which is spectacular but certainly not beyond comprehension. In any case, this scar does not look old. It looks new. And very deep.”

"Oh,” said Sene. She was surprised by a great deal of this. She didn't know that her father had told everyone about Solas. It was a relief, to be honest, because it meant she wouldn't have to do it herself, and she had half a mind to think he did it just to save her the stress, which was confusing. Pertaining to the scar, she had almost forgotten. That whole night, in the brig of Suledin Keep. Men swinging axes at her throat. It was like a nightmare in her memory. Misshapen and black and cold and she had cast it away to the back weeks ago. “He just—he took a bad hit in the field, a couple months back.”

“What happened?” said Yara. She looked at Sene, genuinely curious, and then she looked at Morrigan. The gazebo was a quiet place now. All you could hear were the birds out front and children in the wind like colors.

Then Morrigan set her glass down, full of authority. She took over. She was good at this. It was part of her job. “It happened in Orlais,” she said. She glanced at Sene, who said okay. “A place called the Emprise du Lion. He was taken out by a dragon. It came down hard during a regular fight, took him by surprise, almost like an explosion. A piece of heavy rock shrapnel caught him in the chest, and it sent him to the ground where he hit his head very hard, splitting it clean open. He broke two ribs that day, nearly died, and was unconscious for eighteen hours. That is how he achieved that scar.”

“My gods,” said Rasha.

“It’s okay,” said Sene. “He’s okay. Obviously.”

“Yes, but that must have been terrifying,” said Yara, wringing her hands. “Unconscious for eighteen hours? I remember when Ellas used to go into those ruins with Revasan. Don’t you, Rasha? They’d be gone for weeks, come home with poorly bandaged wounds, bruises everywhere. Even just with that—I had a heart attack every time. I would cry myself to sleep. Are you all right? Does it haunt you?”

Sene stared at her. This outpouring, she was not used to this. She looked down at her knuckles like they might provide the answer. She knew what was what by now. It had been terrifying. It was all she thought about for a long time. She had never admitted that out loud before, but it was true. “We got through it,” she said, nodding to herself. “It was really scary, yes. But I’m all right.”

“When do I get to meet him?” said Fisara, hunched over the table, her attempt to defuse the tension. She’d usurped the bowl of almonds and was picking them apart, one by one.

“Soon,” said Sene.

She glanced at her mother, who was playing at the frilled edges of the white table cloth, not saying anything at all. She seemed to have gone to another world, her cheeks lit from within but her attention removed, redirected to some rose-colored internal battle with herself. It occurred to Sene, in that very moment, how little they all actually knew about her. A world apart. She took a long drink of her champagne and tried to feel at home. It was dry, with very good color. And even though he was right there, in the kitchen, she missed Solas desperately. She should have told her mother everything. But it was like trying to build a world out of thin air. What could she say? What could she do to make the things she’d seen and been through this past year into something that her mother could appreciate?

But perhaps that was not the right choice at all. So Sene refilled her mother’s glass. It was the last of the bottle, and it seemed to shake her out of it, but she was still very tense. “It’s okay now, mom,” said Sene anyway. She didn’t know how else to put it. “I promise. It’s all okay.”

Rasha sipped her champagne. Sene was the kind of daughter who would break the silence. She would speak first, try to fix things. As a child, it had been a particular nuisance, especially for Revasan. But it was, after all this time, for Rasha, a relief. “I know it is,” she said, smiling down at her worn hands. “I have seen it with my own eyes, Isene. I just have trouble believing my eyes sometimes. It is my own quandary to suffer.”

“It belongs to all of us,” said Fisara, very serious. She held out her glass. “Right?”

They toasted. They drank.

 

Inside the kitchen, Solas was helping Kieran tie his apron. “Good and tight,” said Kieran.

“Don’t worry,” said Solas.

“How well do you know this man, Ser Kieran?” said Revasan. He lit the stove with several hot fires. “Is he a man that I can trust?”

“Solas is a great protector,” said Kieran. “He is the most trustworthy man I have ever known. And the tallest.”

“He is taller than Deshanna?”

“Nearly so,” said Kieran.

“Where the fuck is Deshanna?” said Terys. He pushed the window open over the basin sink, stuck his head outside.

“Language, boy,” said Ellas, peeling grapes off the vine at the kitchen table. “That’s a ten-year-old.”

“It’s no bother,” said Kieran. “I’ve spent a lot of time with the Inquisitor. She curses more than all of you put together.”

Solas laughed at this, sent Kieran on his way. “Fetch the blueberries,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

Once he was gone, Deshanna finally came inside. He wore suspenders and a faded linen shirt. He wasted no time.

“Solas, my boy,” he said, a sack of flour tossed over his shoulder. He was sixty-four, massively tall, and hale as shit. A farmer by blood. He held out his hand. “Thank you for being here.”

“It is a pleasure,” said Solas, made of manners. He shook Deshanna’s hand. “Thank you for having me.”

“I hear that you plan to marry my niece.”

“That, I do.”

“Well,” said Deshanna, hauling the flour to the counter and scrubbing at his beard compulsively, “I congratulate you. And Isene, of course. You have my blessing, fully and without compromise. When’s the big day?”

Solas tripped, internally. “Excuse me?”

“I said you have my blessing, fully and without compromise. Then I asked when’s the big day. Next summer, perhaps? Here, or there?”

“We have your blessing?”

“Yes.” Deshanna smirked. “Why?"

“I’m not sure.”

“What were you expecting?" said Deshanna. "Blood pacts and negotiations over cigars, as I asked after your worth in a haunted cellar somewhere?”

“Something like that.”

Deshanna clapped a hand to Solas’s shoulder. It was true that they were exactly the same height. “Solas, a man’s worth is defined by those who love him. Isene is of great worth, to me and to everyone here.” He sighed. “Plus, Rev has already given you his blessing, and if he trusts you, then the gods know I do as well.”

“Please excuse my language," said Solas, "but are you fucking with me?”

Deshanna laughed, terribly impressed. He took the toothpick from behind his ear and proceeded to pick his teeth as he went over to the basin. “You tell it like it is,” he said.

“Yes, I do.”

“I suppose you thought I was the viper in this arrangement.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Most do,” he said. “But I’m the voice, Solas. And the charm. Like yourself, I do all the talking. Rev is, however, the brains and the guts. As my oldest nephew, and my First, his say is as good as my own, and in some cases, such as this one, his trumps. You’re a gambling man, I assume.”

Solas raised his eyebrows. “I have gambled some, yes.”

“Then you know what I mean. Hand me that towel?”

Solas obliged.

“What manner of cards do you play?” said Deshanna, washing and drying his hands.

“I play all manner of cards.”

“That’s the spirit.”

Revasan, meanwhile, seemed to be paying little attention. He was measuring the flour into a large, heavy bowl through a sifter. Ellas was beating the eggs with a whisk. Deshanna began pouring the champagne.

“Did we send the boy for blueberries?” he said.

“Yes,” said Solas.

“You’ll man the grill,” said Rev, glancing his way. “Does that work for you?”

Solas nodded. “Certainly.”

“Are you the sort of man who can cook?”

"Am I the sort of man who can cook what?"

"You know what I mean."

“Cooking is just a component of math for me,” said Solas. “Therefore, yes."

“I hear you’re also an ancient elf and a mage of considerable power,” said Deshanna, point blank. He handed him a flute of champagne. “In addition to being a cook and a mathematician, of course. Is that true?”

Solas glanced around, but the room lacked all reaction. “It is.”

“Revasan told us this morning.”

“This morning?” said Solas. “How long have you all been awake?”

“Since like five,” said Terys. He was leaning back in his chair with his feet up on the table. He was peeling potatoes.

“Don’t look so miffed, Ser Solas,” said Ellas. “That’s just farmers.”

Rev smiled. The cat had been let out of the bag to no avail, it seemed, and they were all terribly unimpressed by his backstory. This was a crushing, unholy relief.

“I should have figured,” said Solas.

Deshanna held out his glass. "Cheers," he said. Solas met him in the middle. They toasted, drank. Solas looked down into the bubbles.

Deshanna, meanwhile, considered the flavor of the champagne, studied the color against the white of the walls. “Do you like this shit? Champagne?”

“In the mornings, sure.”

“We don’t have any mages in Clan Lavellan,” said Deshanna, like a side note, burying his nose in the flute. He glanced over at Ellas. “Which bottle is this?”

“The _Vun’lea._ Last year.”

“It’s bright. Like a whip on the nose.” He looked at Solas. “Did you hear me?”

“I did,” said Solas. “And I know. About the mages.”

Deshanna sighed. “Ancient elves like you are novelty, of course,” he said, swirling the champagne, another sip. He became rather serious. “But you are not a novelty, Solas, are you? You’re a man of your own volition, your own agenda and code."

"That, I am."

"But there are certain, interesting rarities about you," Deshanna continued. "Certain rarities that, over the many years we’ll come to know and appreciate one another, I plan to investigate. Often over cards and brandy. You will, of course, be welcome to counter my investigations with your own, as I’m sure you will, no doubt. I’ve read all about your studies and your curiosities and the remarkable work you’ve done for my niece’s organization in the south. In any case, all of it, our discussions and mutual discoveries, shall exist in the seriousness and blood code of family. Confidence. Do you understand? I'm not sure what your experience is with family loyalty, but there are no betrayals here, Solas. That is prerequisite. You can count on that, and the walls of this compound are absolute in their secrecy. So, is that all right with you? That your history become, not absorbed, but shared as a part of our own?”

Solas swallowed his champagne. It went straight to his head, but he was used to it by now. He felt this sort of dropping sensation in his chest, like an anvil, or a giant padlock coming loose. He was overcome by Deshanna’s sentiment. It was an unexpected, premeditated outpouring of sincerity that he had not expected, and he did not know what to say. Still, the other men in the room hardly flinched. Terys and Ellas were half-embedded in their own conversation, something about the surface dwarves of Ansburg. Revasan was focused, as he folded together these little puff pastries in the shapes of triangles to be baked in the kiln.

This was regularity for them, Solas realized. This was typical. Such serious relations spread and appreciated by so many different people. They truly loved each other, despite their differences. And here he was, a part. In the end, such a loaded promise from a man like Deshanna was meant for two reasons: the first was to scare off the lessers, and the second was to make a guarantee. Of inclusion and unconditional acceptance. Family. A guarantee from a man like Deshanna was priceless. This much, Solas understood. Still, he knew that Sene was suspicious. He knew she had endured a great deal of ostracism here. But she was just as conflicted as he was. About all of this. He would always be on her side, that was the truth, and this truth, in and of itself, he knew now, was a truth that the men and women here would honor over and above all. It was a given. Marriage was a sanctity all its own. Like life itself. They already knew all of this, the Lavellans, and yet they accepted him anyway.

“Of course,” said Solas. A man of his stoicism. He felt the tension in his jaw. Later, he would free himself if he had to. With her, alone, as he often did those days. “I am used to feeling like a novelty, in any case. But I understand loyalty, Keeper Deshanna. I've never been a part of something like this, but I understand it very well, and I am honored.”

Deshanna made no show of this. He merely nodded in solidarity, and the men continued with their work. Kieran came back with the blueberries, and as Solas helped him wash them up in the basin, he felt boyish and strange, like the youngest man in the room, even as he showed Kieran how to dry the berries without smashing them in his hand.

At some point, Deshanna looked over at Solas as they were mixing the batter for the pancakes and preparing the grill, and he told a story. “There was a mage once who used to come through these parts and make fireworks,” he said, wiping his hands on his apron. “His name was Winterson. He was a human, and this was many years ago. The show that he made was magnificent. Shapes and lanterns in the sky, and I remember it was around this time every year, the coming of spring when he arrived. He has since died of old age. His wife still lives in the the Vinmarks, I believe, with her many cows, but obviously Winterson the mage does not come around anymore. I miss those years.” He became genuinely curious then. He stopped what he was doing entirely. “Can you make fireworks, Solas?”

Solas finished his drink. The champagne was so dry, it was like liquid dust. Moonlight in a glass, the way it floated, very clean. It seemed to suck out his pain and wash him from the inside out. He nodded in delirium. “I can.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Elven Translation:
> 
> "Ane amem." - "You are safe."


	58. Geometry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Part two of two.

1.

By the fire, their last night in Ansburg: Sene and Solas sat beside one another, tucked up against a great sitting stone. Like poetry. It was warm there, and the sky had cleared in the past few days, and the fire seemed to pour into the stars where Solas’s fireworks still melted off the atmosphere. They had lingered for three days. This was the fourth night. Sene and Solas were set to leave the following morning, to ride south to Ostwick as hard as they could, where they’d catch a freighter to Highever—traveling in secret with only their guards undercover—and then get right back on their horses and head south to Crestwood where they would set up camp and go hunting for rifts.

It had been so long since they’d been in Crestwood. So many bad things had happened there. But it was a beautiful place full of purple flowers and sun so hot it got into your heart parts, heating you from the inside, and Sene was looking forward to it. Really looking forward to it, because it had been a long time since she and Solas had been alone in the wild. She hoped they would be able to stay for a little while, just a few days at least, before finally heading back to Skyhold after such a long hiatus from the Inquisition.

Everything was calling back to her now, making her feel things. Solas was calm beside her, and she was in his arms, and she thought about how he had never seemed so calm. Never once this calm, in the year or more that she’d known him—his muscles loose and his jaw relaxed. Everything about him quiet, and even. He didn’t talk about it much. He didn’t have much to say, and because Sene was Sene, she just let it be. They were happy and safe, and the world was an island of their shepherds, guiding them the fastest way home, and they just followed. They just went along on the breeze.

The two of them sat across the fire from Rasha and Revasan, who sat separately but close to one another. Rasha was folding tissue paper into the shapes of flowers and preparing to send them all back to Skyhold with Sene. She was making one for every single person Sene counted as a friend. She had Sene make her a list, and she was going to make extras just in case she missed anyone. Rasha had a special way of folding her paper flowers so that they could be flattened during transport without losing their integrity. It was a Dalish tradition, handed down to her by her own mother. Revasan, meanwhile, was smoking and tossing pieces of bark into the fire. He did not have the Dalish tradition about him. He was modernized. He did not understand the lives of migratory elves beyond his wife’s idle stories, and her clan, who he'd met a few times before they'd got lost to the Blight. This, his relative lack of wisdom, and the luck he'd had, made him all the more determined to protect the old traditions. He did not want to forget.

That night, Revasan was warm with the booze and wide open, and yet, he always managed to look stern and pensive. Sene wondered sometimes: what had made him that way, so closed and filled with communicative dysfunction? But lately, she had begun to ask herself a different question, whether, perhaps, some men are just born separate from their emotions, and they need a lover to crack the lid and stick them back inside. Rasha glanced at him every once in a while, and he would glance back, and sometimes, they would smile. But for the most part, they were all tied up in conversation.

There was a bottle of wine wrapped in a cold rag and stuck in the dirt, and the light from the fireworks mixed with the light from the moon were making the fire look pink. When it got a little low, Solas snapped his fingers, and it it stoked once more. The hour was late. Deshanna and Fisara and Ellas and Yara and Terys and Morrigan and Kieran had kicked off to bed hours ago. But there was a goodbye lingering in the air, and this stirred something up inside the house of Revasan. Rasha was nervous, and Revasan was concerned with making her less nervous. Sene sensed this and Solas sensed her, and together they all just decided to prolong the evening without discussion. It was an unspoken consensus, and maybe it’s not the way all families do things, but here, it was.

“Have the two of you thought at all about where you’re going to live?” said Rasha at some point. She was spinning a piece of twine around the colorful base of a paper flower. Her paper flowers were lovely. Sene had always thought so.

“Not really,” said Sene. She looked at Solas. “Perhaps we should.”

“I imagine that the notion of home will find us where we least expect it,” he said.

“Doesn’t it always?” said Revasan.

“I had something else to ask you,” said Rasha to Solas. She faltered, pushed the curly red hair out of her face. She kept hers shorter than Sene’s, but it was still a nuisance. “Though perhaps it’s too much.”

“Ask away,” said Solas. His arm slung over Sene’s shoulders, she hid inside him and felt very safe.

“On the note of home, I just wondered if we might meet your mother—at the wedding. I heard you mention that she lives, like you.”

Solas thought about it, and Sene could tell he had not thought about it before. “I suppose,” he said. “She’ll be there.”

“That’s very exciting,” said Rasha, her cheeks pink. She looked at Sene. “What is she like, Isene?”

“Solas’s mother?” said Sene.

“Yes.”

“You’re asking me?”

Solas smiled. “It’s different coming from you, vhenan.”

“Oh,” said Sene. She searched her brain. She hadn’t spent enough time with Lea, she was sure, but there had to be something that she could say that would cover it all. “She’s tough.”

“Tough?”

“Yeah,” said Sene. “Real tough. Sort of like Fisara. She’s pretty, and she has this long, black hair and gray eyes and the strangest magic. She can make ice.”

“Ice?” said Revasan. “Like when the river freezes over?”

“Sort of,” said Sene. “That’s the idea. It’s ice. But she can make it in all sorts of shapes. Like flowers and bees and things like that.”

“Ice in the shapes of bees?” said Rasha.

“Yes,” said Sene. “It’s really neat.”

“Did she do those sorts of things for you growing up, Solas?” said Rasha.

“She did,” said Solas. He rested his cheek on the top of Sene’s head, kissed her hair.

“Can you make ice, Solas?” said Revasan. He tossed a pebble into the fire.

“Sort of,” said Solas. “But only in combat situations, typically. Ice is difficult. It is not really my area of expertise.”

“What about your father, Solas?” said Rasha then, quickly. She had her nose back in her paper flowers, very focused. But she was good at doing two things at once. “I don’t believe I’ve heard you mention him.” She looked up then, realizing her mistake. She blushed. “Perhaps there is a reason for that. I’m sorry. I should not pry.”

“It’s all right,” said Solas. The fire crackled and smelled very good. “You don’t have to be sorry. It is a normal question to ask. But my father is dead. He died when I was nine years old.”

“He died?” said Rasha, very still.

Solas nodded. “He was an architect, a structural engineer. He built army barracks for one of the many military factions in existence at the time. He was killed by an ice mine, ironically. It was a freak attack. The men who planted it, I learned much later that they meant to plant it somewhere else. They got their wires crossed.”

Revasan was fixed on Solas now, his brow very stern. Rasha had stopped what she was doing to listen, but she was still looking down at her paper flowers, running the tissue paper between her fingers piece by piece by piece.

“He died building barracks?” said Revasan.

“Yes.”

“Were you an only child?”

“Yes.”

“So it was just you and your mother after that?”

“Yes.”

“I am so sorry, Solas,” said Revasan, never once looking away, like this, this was the great discovery, the great mystical secret of Solas. It wasn't that he was an ancient elf or Fen'Harel. He was fatherless. That was everything. Revasan had a joint hitched to the corner of his mouth, but then he snuffed it out in the dirt and tossed it into the fire. “That must have been very difficult. I am glad to see you’ve come through it intact. And your mother.”

“Thank you,” said Solas. Sene squeezed his hand, hard. “I’m just happy to be here.”

“It is a sad thing,” said Rasha, glancing up from her paper flowers, no tears on her cheeks. She was just thinking. “Losing family too soon.”

“Yes, it is,” said Solas.

She looked at him, and he looked at her, and he smiled, sealing the moment away, and then she went back to her flowers, and growing inside the fire was some quiet, pure electricity that filled the air and told them all they were in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.

 

Morrigan, meanwhile, in a backhouse not far away, was tucking in Kieran, who, upon their return, had suddenly been taken with emotion, and he wanted her to tell him stories from the Well of Sorrows. She told him as many as she could conjure. Since Mythal’s return to the physical world, the voices inside had gotten quieter and harder to parse from her own, but they were still there, and they were like memories. At some point, she got to the end of the fifth or six, and she was sitting by Kieran’s bedside as the light from the moon and the fireworks came through the blinds and cast colorful shadows on the wall, and Kieran said it was enough.

“You don’t have to go on, mother,” he said. “I think I’ll fall asleep now.”

The certainty in his voice was so endearing, and he was very snuggly and very warm, so Morrigan crawled right into bed with him. There was no reason not to. Together, they knew that their time at the Lavellan compound was wearing thin. With Sene and Solas returning to Skyhold, this meant that they, too, would need to return. It was a part of why neither of them could really sleep that night. _Nothing lasts forever, Morrigan._ Mythal had said this in the brig at Suledin Keep. The words burned into her bones. She knew that it was true.

But still. The Inquisition was not done for, she thought as she listened to Kieran’s breathing—even, calm as he drifted away. The Inquisition had brought Morrigan back into the world, and it gave her a better life. One where she could quietly be herself, and people still came to accept her. Sometimes, she looked so deep inside, she found a hole there, and a bottomless void, and it screamed back at her, _Nobody loves you._ But where she had used to seal it up and push it away into oblivion, she knew now it was a lie. She was not a nice person. She would never truly be _nice._ That was just Morrigan. But she could be soft if she wanted to, and she could fit in, and she could give, and she could occupy her own small corner of the world, without having to be alone. That was what mattered now.

 

Sene and Solas fell asleep leaning against the sitting stone by the fire. At some point, Revasan tugged on one of Sene’s curls. When she woke, he pointed to the house, gestured that they should call it a night. Rasha was already inside the house. Sene nodded. Once he was gone, she nudged Solas until he came to, groggy, and looked at her and smiled.

“Time to go to bed,” she said.

He put the hair behind her ear. “Okay.”

They got up. Solas first, like always, and he helped her to her feet. Revasan had put out the fire, and all the world was a drowsy, night sky memory. Solas glanced up at the stars. He blinked, and the fireworks melted away, just like that. It got so dark, so quick. Sene’s eyes couldn’t adjust as she searched out their shapes, ringing in her retinas. Big beautiful flowers and pools of color in the sky. Solas made a butterfly for light, and they leaned into one another as they went up the walk and through the front door. The house was quiet and clean. Several empty bottles sat in the basin sink, freshly rinsed. In Sene’s room, they lit no candles. Solas let the butterfly dissolve in Sene’s hair, and in some sort of perfect, practiced silence, they made love deep in the bed. Like a dream, swathed in bedsheets. She kissed him tenderly and let him take the lead. He balled his fists in her hair as he came inside.

The day before, Morrigan had asked Sene away for a private walk in the vineyards, and they went along and stopped under the very tree where she had read Sene’s energies and told her that she was not pregnant about a month before. They sat down with their legs folded up in front of them, and she took a linen satchel out of her leather shoulder bag, and she gave it to Sene. Inside was a clear, corked jar of something that smelled like chartreuse, very green. Sene looked at her in confusion. “What is this?” she said.

“It is birth control,” said Morrigan. She wrapped her hands around Sene’s where they held the jar. “I should have thought of it sooner, with everything you’ve been through. I am sorry, Sene. My mind takes longer to process some of life’s simpler equations these days. That, I shall admit. But I did think of it, finally, and now, you may call it an early wedding gift.” She dropped her hands back into her lap.

“Birth control?” said Sene, studying the vial. “How does it work?”

“Take half a teaspoon,” said Morrigan. “Every day, for as long as you do not wish to become pregnant. It is a potion, magic. It creates a small, harmless barrier with no immediate or long term side effects. In terms of its magical function, it is no different than the vitality potions we would drink in and outside of battle. Know that the moment you stop taking it for even just a single day, the barrier will wear off. This jar will last you about six months. The recipe is simple, and with the Inquisition’s access to an adept apothecary, it will not be difficult to get more.”

“Is this common knowledge?” said Sene.

“Somewhat,” said Morrigan. “At least among mages. Not as much outside the Circles, and I am not at all surprised that, coming from a non-magical clan, you’ve never heard of it.”

Sene put the jar in her lap. She looked at her hands. “If it’s common knowledge among mages,” she said, “then why didn’t Solas say anything?”

Morrigan sighed. She plucked a blade of grass from the earth and began to shred it into little green strips. “As a potion available to non-mages, it’s only been around for the past ten years or so,” she said. “It’s probable that Solas simply did not know.”

“Oh,” said Sene. She nodded. It made sense. Of course he wouldn’t know. She was overcome then, with a kind of intense relief. It was so pure. She set down the jar, and she leaned forward and hugged Morrigan very hard. “Thank you,” she said. She was starting to cry. She wasn’t sure why. It was just there. “This means a lot.”

I could go on and on about how Sene and Morrigan had found friendship amidst the landscape of war, sisterhood in the dust from the crumbling atmosphere, all that. That two young women from opposite ends of existence can collide in space, become a star—anything’s possible, and metaphors are pretty. But looking back, I’m certain they’d just have me leave them be, happy and hidden beneath the weeping fronds of that willow tree. They never much liked too much attention anyway.

 

_2._

“Fucker, finally,” said Sene.

She was sweaty. Time had passed. Her hair was sticking to the back of her neck, and here she was, at the top of a yellow canyon, staring down into the black mouth of a rift in the Veil while Solas stood beside her, very calm, in Crestwood.

They had been walking all fucking day to find this thing. It turned out that they’d accomplished a lot more here than they’d realized. By closing the large rift beneath the lake, they’d set off a chain reaction, closing several more rifts in the immediate area. They were all connected. And getting rid of that dragon had hauled in people from all corners of existence. A lot of refugees from the Hinterlands whose homes had been burnt in the war were migrating in, quickly—families of surface dwarves, elves, and humans alike. The Dalish dairy farm outside the village had grown, and so had the clan who worked it. Cassie’s cotton farm had been sold to a family of land rich nobles from the north, and the bounty turned over to her in full. The entire deal had been brokered by Josephine, on behalf of the Inquisition. Meanwhile, the village of New Crestwood was revived and repainted, the shutters bright and clean. There were merchants from as far north as Antiva, and over three hundred people plucking in and around the cobble streets. Several houses had gone up off the Old Market Road, and thanks to the Inquisition, the bandits no longer posed a problem in areas of high population. All told, it was a new place. It had been redeemed, or that’s what Solas said. When they rode into town it was the middle of the night, and still they were met with cheers and onlookers. They slept in Caer Bronach, in their nest beneath the bells, and they felt no pangs from what had happened the last time. It had been lost somewhere in the shifting of the seasons, and the vanquish of enemy threats, and the truth was that they were just happy to be there, and they made no effort to complicate that.

“It’s small,” said Solas about the rift. He studied it, then he studied the tip of his staff. They were ducked behind a sizable rock. They were alone on this hunt, just the two of them, which was not something they’d ever really done before.

“No shit,” said Sene. She scratched at her braids. They were tight. She looked around, like she just realized they were alone. “Wait.”

“What?” said Solas.

“Do we have a strategy?”

“A strategy?”

Sene put her hands on her head, exasperated. “Come on, Solas,” she said. “You’re the one who’s always so freaked out about my safety.”

“And _you’re_ the one who’s always yelling at me about being freaked out about your safety. Can a man not learn?”

“What’s our fucking strategy, Solas.”

Solas sighed. He looked around. “Our strategy is, we kill the demons and you close the rift. It will be swift, vhenan.”

“But we don’t have a point man.”

“A point man?”

“You know,” said Sene, taking her bow of her back, scratching at her shins. The grass was tall here, getting inside her boots “Bull goes in first, yells a bunch of shit and gets everyone all riled up. Then we bear in at range, full power. We don’t have Bull today. We don’t have a point man.”

“I see,” said Solas. He was studying the field now. There were five demons in all, one demon of Despair, which was, perhaps, the only one to worry about. “We don’t need a point man, vhenan,” he said. “Or, I’ll be your point man. Do not worry.”

“You? What are you going to do? Punch it to death?”

“Perhaps,” said Solas. “I’m very good at punching things, vhenan.”

“I know,” said Sene, like she felt bad or something. “I know you are—that’s not the point.”

“What is the point.”

“I’m trying to think like the Inquisitor here. You are not a front line warrior, Solas. You’re not dressed for that kind of fight. I’m not letting you just barrel in there like some asshole ready to die.”

“I am not going to die, vhenan.”

“You always say that, but some day, you will die.”

“That is true.”

She got quiet. She had pieces of hair in her face. They’d come loose from her braids somewhere along the way. She stared at him hard with a red, furrowed brow and a lot of anxiety. She was having second thoughts.

“Do you want to do this?” said Solas.

“Yes.”

“Then listen to me," he said. He put his hands on her shoulders, looked her straight in eye. “We don’t need a point man, because I am more powerful now than I was before. Remember? I have more power. I can protect us, and I can do more damage. Plus, these are weak creatures. You know that.”

She licked her lips. They were chapped from the walk. She seemed to understand him, but she was not satisfied. “How much power.”

“What do you mean?”

“What are you gonna do to them?” she said. “Do I get to have at least one?”

“Take them all, Sene. What do you want?”

“This isn’t real unless it’s real, Solas. Do you know what I mean?” She held out her left hand, like an emblem. She was really fucking serious. “I need it to be real, and for it to be real, we need a strategy. Do you know what I mean?”

He was searching her, reading her. She was pushing him out. She’d never wanted him in her brain before a fight. “I do,” he said. “Sene, I understand.”

“Then you know I need you to hold back,” she said. “I know it sounds dumb, and I know you’re Fen’Harel, and I saw your fireworks, how long they lived up there in the sky over the farm. I felt it, that day at the treehouse. It gets in my bones, Solas, in my body, like it knows me. I know your power, and I know it’s big. It’s really big. And I know it’s not forever, but I also saw what Mythal could do with just a whisper of her old magic, and so I know that you could probably just blink your stupid eyes and turn those demons into stone or something, just like that. And they’d be dead."

"Stupid eyes?"

"All of them, at once," she continued, ignoring him. "And they would be stone, and the world would shake, and we’d all fall into the middle like morons. But I need you to hold back today. Just a little, because I’m not just your girl for show. Okay?”

It was the end of the line, and he could feel it, crisping her insides like paper.

So he put the hair behind her ear. He nodded, sternly. “Okay,” he said.

She smiled. “Thank you.”

“But if you get into trouble, vhenan,” he said, “I am going to save you, and you cannot stop me.”

She shoved him. “Fine.”

“Fine,” he said. He got in her face then, and he smirked.

It was a hungry look, what he gave her, and it left weird feelings in her gut. She wanted to fuck him in the weeds behind that rock in the canyons of Crestwood, and it was all mixed up with the impending violence in the valley below, and this was confusing. This was how they’d begun, as soldiers. She hadn’t stood beside him in battle like this for a long time—not without a million fears and unknowns lingering between them. When she looked at him now, all that stuff—Solas’s sadness and the missing pieces of his heart, it was all still there. She knew that from their last night in Ansburg, at the fire, but he was healing, and she was a part of it, and she felt like she loved him new, again, like they were starting over together, and in some ways, they were—they were going to get married. And while she’d played it very cool with her female relatives, somewhere inside her heart, she was shrieking with satisfaction. The prospect filled her with purpose. She loved him and she wanted to have his babies forever. It was stupid and about as simple as that, and she would never tell.

It took them about thirty minutes to dispense with the demons. They played things calm, and they used stealth. But in the end, they’d had to get close, and that Despair demon pissed Solas off when it whipped Sene around by her hair, and so he struck the thing to ashes. It was loud. That was all Sene remembered. _Loud._ And fast. Like a whip, like lightning, a big bang coming from the sky. She wasn’t angry when he did this. In fact, she was relieved. She would have done the same thing if she were him.

But Solas looked conflicted. Afterward, he tossed his staff to the earth, took off his gloves, and he stared into the scorch marks in the weeds as if they were a thing he recognized too well. He looked very big to her then, huge and tall against the violence, the death in the valley. He was not this kind of man, but she could see now why many thought he should be. And maybe he had been at some other point in his life—the kind of man who could use violence without feeling anything at all. But whatever that persona was, it had been stripped to the studs a long time ago, too much personal loss in his wake, and now he was laid bare to her in the aftermath. Who he truly was. He was not a god, and he was not a murderer.

He looked at her, and she knew that it was over. The anchor was wild at her side, green and stinging in her bones. It was hurting again, and she wouldn’t admit it at the time, but she knew that he knew anyway.

Without another moment of hesitation, she sucked the rift from existence, felt the magic jangle her insides and bring her to her knees like it always did. She started crying when it passed, and then she wiped the tears off her face where they were getting mixed in with the sweat and the curls, and she said to Solas, “I’m ready now.”

And he was there.

He got down beside her. It had happened quickly, and they sat with their knees up in the middle of the yellow valley. There were huge outcroppings of rock on all sides of them, and the wind whistled past their ears. You could still feel the heat of the Veil, healing itself, like holding your hand too close to a hot stove. Solas took her left hand, like he had the very first day they met, and so many days after that. He told her to remain still, and to stay calm, and not to worry, that it would be fast, and she nodded her head, and she watched as he lifted the mark from her bare palm, just like a ball of pure, green energy, and he took it back—the thing that had both plagued and saved her life, the thing that had set all of this in motion from the start.

Once it was gone, the world was quiet.There was a pink, shiny scar in the shape of a perfect circle at the base of her palm, about the size of a coin—like the magic had siphoned out in such a way that was geometrically predetermined, and it would not be forgotten.

_Magic is just like anything else, lethal’lan, he’d said to her on that rooftop in Haven, her hand in his as he examined—the knuckles, the wrist. It must adapt._

_What does that mean?_

_It is getting used to you, he said, and he smiled, because it was true._ _It will calm down. Give it time._

“Solas?” said Sene.

“Yes?” He had gotten lost again. He shook his head out. He was still holding her hand, but the sun was beating down on them with the strength of summer. What season was this?

“Are you okay?”

He looked at her, and then he became fully aware. This was Sene, and he could feel the wind whipping at his neck, the dust scrambling his eyeballs. He saw the scar. The second scar she’d endured since he met her. “Does it hurt anymore?” he said.

“No,” she said. But she seemed unsure. “I don’t think so, but Solas?”

“Yes?”

“Does that scar mean that there’s something wrong, on the inside?”

He just stared.

“Please tell me the truth,” she said, clutching her wrist, holding it close to her heart. “Just tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“Is there damage?” she said, her voice quiet. “Pain could mean something bad, Solas. Pain could mean damage. It hurt back at the treehouse, and it hurt before, right before I closed the rift. I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t want to scare you, but it hurt.”

He sighed. “We should get out of this valley.”

“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me first. Just read my fucking bones or my energies or whatever it is you can do and tell me. I need to know. Is there something wrong with me?”

He looked at Sene. She was so pretty, everything coming loose, and she was a patchwork girl, and yet, she was still so pretty. There could be nothing wrong with her, no matter what. “I don’t know,” he said, in earnest, because he could not feel anything, not like this. There was a block, like his love was too big. His fear of losing her too great. It wouldn’t let him see the future. That wasn’t the way things worked.

“You don’t know?”

“I can’t see it, Sene. I’m sorry.”

“What does that mean?”

“Time will have to tell. Are you feeling all right? Now?”

“Yes, I feel fine.”

“Then that will have to be enough, for both of us.”

Vultures circled overhead. Somewhere in the distance, they could hear men working, on a ship, down at the docks. It was after noon, and the bustle of Crestwood was in full swing all around them.

Sene stopped crying. She knew he was telling the truth. Nothing is perfect, and they were not spared the limitations of their mortality, no matter who they were. This was a lesson. So she got to her feet, quickly, and she dusted off her armor, and he followed. Without a word, she went over to where Solas had tossed his staff, and she picked it out of the weeds. Plain and practical, she gave it back to him. She glanced down at her empty left hand, at the scar there. A circle. It didn’t scare her. She was surprised by this. It emboldened her, like a serious reminder that everything that had happened—between the two of them, the Inquisition, the Breach, the miscarriage, Solas's injury, Corypheus, assassins in the Emprise du Lion, the treehouse and Mythal and Leanathy regrown from the earth—it was all real. She thought she would be more scared, but she wasn’t, because she knew that whatever came, she wouldn’t have to face it alone. Now that the anchor was gone, her anxiety about losing it was gone, too, and whatever fears she held for the future, those were in the future. Sene was a practical woman, remember, and she was loved. She would deal with the future when it hit her square in the face. Until then.

“It’ll be okay,” she said. She looked at Solas. “Whatever happens.” She smoothed her hair, and she saw the washed out browns of the canyons and heard the faint cries of the vultures overhead. She didn’t give any shits about them. They were here to clean up the mess, everything in its place. The air was so clear here. The sun was so bright and pure.

Sene was an optimist. Solas’s consensus was simple.

“Yes, it will, vhenan.”

They breathed out. He flung his arm around her shoulders, heavy and spent post-battle, and she leaned on him, and they slunk out of that canyon together in rags, very tall and washing their hands of the day. Four dead demons and a pile of ashes in their wake. They heard the vultures, waiting till they were out of sight to begin their dance of right angles, descending to the valley floor, one after the other after the other.

 

  _3_ _._

Sene and Solas walked along the road to Caer Bronach for almost an hour before they realized they'd lost track of their direction. Somewhere along the line, they'd taken a wrong turn and found themselves surrounded by low, grassy bluffs with a distant view of the water. There was a stretch of prairie before them about twenty acres long and a cottage about eighty yards ahead with smoke rising from the chimney.

“Are we lost?” said Solas, looking around.

“Noway,” said Sene. “We’ve walked that road hundreds of times.”

Solas gave her a look. “Hundreds may be a bit of an overstatement, vhenan. We’ve walked it four times, maybe.”

She waved him off. “I don’t remember this house,” she said.

“Perhaps we’ve tipped over into the Hinterlands,” he said. “The rift was rather south of the fortress.”

“That’s pretty far south.”

“Yes, well,” said Solas, “we’ve been walking for a while, and we take long strides.”

They stopped at what appeared to be the edge of the property. There was a simple, rundown fence that came up to about Sene’s knees, plus a carrot patch, as far as they could see, and a lemon tree and a rose garden around the side of the cottage up ahead. There was also a man, who looked like a bandit, or maybe just some sort of vagabond, they couldn’t be sure, and he was attempting to pry open one of the downstairs windows with what appeared to be a crow bar. Stupidly, he had not noticed that the kitchen window was wide open. Sene and Solas both stopped to sigh at such appalling banditry.

“Is this guy serious?” said Sene. “It’s the middle of the day.”

“Perhaps whoever owns the house is not home,” said Solas," and he’s been casing the place.”

“There’s smoke coming out of the chimney. Somebody’s cooking.”

“It could be that they put a pie in the kiln and left. Those take a long time to bake, don’t they?”

“What, pies?”

He smirked. She shoved him in the shoulder. “Well, this is bullshit,” she said after a moment. She drew an arrow then, and she nocked it in her bow.

“You’re not going to shoot him down just for prying open a window?” said Solas, casual. “For all we know, that is his house, and he’s locked out.”

“That guy does not live here,” said Sene. “You know it, and I know it.”

“Still, vhenan.”

“I’m not going to shoot him,” she said. “I’m just going to…warn him. You know me better than that.”

“Of course,” said Solas. “Fire away, Inquisitor.”

She looked at him. He nodded. She pulled back the bowstring, aimed. The breeze out here in the bluffs was less than it had been in the valley. She released, and the arrow soared with massive ease. It hit the earth and stuck, not two inches from the man’s left ankle. When he saw it, he tripped and fell backward from surprise.

Solas laughed. “Good shot, vhenan.”

“Thank you,” she said, stowing her bow. “We’ll see if he gets the message.”

That, he did. The moment he saw them, he stood up, looked in their direction, and Solas and Sene both waved.

“Inquisition?” he called out through his hands.

Solas gave him the thumbs up. The man picked up his crow bar and ran.

They both smiled, self-satisfied in a way of practiced intention. “Let’s see if anybody’s home,” said Sene.

“Very good,” said Solas.

They hopped the fence. When the got across the lawn, all the way up to the house, they noticed that the world smelled like apples. Baking apples. Solas smirked at her. “Pie,” he said.

“Yeah, yeah,” she said.

The cottage was small, but it was not too small, and it was well-built. Solas made note of this. He ran his hands along the load-bearing beams at the corners and the arches of the doorway in appreciation. The bricks were big, heavy, and brown, the rooftop sort of lofted up, flattening out at the top, and there were flowered vines growing up along a rickety trellis. The shutters had been painted purple, not recently, and you could see the old blue paint peaking through underneath. When they knocked on the door, no one answered. It seemed that Solas had been entirely right in his supposition. As usual. They stood around on the porch for a while and waited to see if something would happen. It was so quiet. All you could hear was the wind in the feral grain fields and, somewhere, a babbling brook.

“I guess they’re not home,” said Solas.

But in that moment, a woman appeared. She was cresting the hill where they’d just come from, and she was carrying a basket and wearing a wide-brimmed hat. When she saw them on her porch, she stopped, squinting toward them. Solas waved in a harmless manner, and Sene followed suit, and as the woman got closer, she took off her hat, and they saw that she was an elf, a great deal older than the two of them combined. She was small and wore a blue prairie dress that went down to her ankles. Her basket was filled with blackberries.

“Well, I’ll be,” she said as she came up the walk. She looked floored. “Are you the Inquisitor? At my house, the Inquisitor?”

Sene blushed. “You recognized me.”

“Your red hair is storied, girl,” said the old woman, smiling. She took in Solas then and raised her eyebrow. “The warrior, I assume.”

“As the stories go,” said Solas. He held out his hand. “My name is—”

“Solas,” said the woman. She shook his hand out of politeness. “Yes, I know. I read the post, young man.”

He smiled, placed his hands in his pockets. “Of course you do.”

“This is your house?” said Sene.

“Yes, ma’am,” said the old woman. “My name is Rebecca. Will you tell me what this is about?”

“We were just on our way back to Caer Bronach,” said Solas. “We saw a bandit, attempting to break in through your front window.”

"A bandit?" But the woman sighed then, like she was not surprised in the slightest. “Did you kill him? This bandit?”

“No,” said Sene. “We just scared him. He ran off. Has this happened before?”

“He’s not a bandit,” said the woman, coming up the porch steps. “He’s just a local, an ex-Templar. Once, I let him in for a pot of coffee, and he’s been bugging me ever since. I can’t tell if he wants my jewelry or just my coffee.”

Sene smiled, though she wasn’t sure whether that was appropriate. “We’ll send some scouts out to keep an eye on the place for a few weeks,” said Sene. “He shouldn’t bother you anymore.”

“Thank you, Inquisitor,” said Rebecca. She surveyed them both then. She was mighty small, especially without her hat. “The two of you look like hell.”

Solas laughed, just a little. “We had a run-in with a rift.”

“Oh, one of those things,” said the woman. “We were lucky, we didn’t get too many this far south. Most of them kicked up around the lake.”

“That’s good to know,” said Sene.

“Would you both like to come in for a pot of coffee?” said the woman. “I have a habit of letting stray soldiers into my house, as you can see. Rest and recuperation. They are paramount. It was just the way we did things, when I was a girl.”

“Where did you grow up?” said Solas.

“Ferelden,” she said. “Highever. My husband was a gardener. We moved south after we got married. The land was cheap in Crestwood. It still is.”

“My mother is from Highever,” said Sene.

The woman studied her then, as if she only just realized the truth. “You’re Dalish, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” said Sene.

“Where is your vallaslin?”

“I—” she faltered. She looked at Solas. She supposed the news of its removal had not been news as much to anyone outside the Dalish community. “I had it removed.”

“Interesting,” said Rebecca. “And you still identify as Dalish?”

“Yes,” said Sene. She was very red in the cheeks, at the center of attention. “I do. The Dalish are more than blood writing.”

“That they are,” said Rebecca, smiling at them both. “Now, won't you both come in? There is a pie baking, so the house might be a bit warm. I’ve got a table and chairs out back.”

“That sounds wonderful,” said Solas.

 

In the backyard, they sat around a small, green cast iron table. Solas was nearly too big for the chair. He just managed, but he had to take off his jacket, and to sit up very straight, and the picture of him, hulking over such a tiny piece of furniture was almost comical. There were wind chimes here, and they sang a pretty song, reminding them both of home. They sipped their coffee from red porcelain mugs and ate cookies, and the old woman, Rebecca, also poured glasses of water with slices of lemon.

“So, you’re getting married?” she said after a while, refilling Solas’s mug. She had hung her hat on the back of her chair. It was adorned with blue ribbons.

“Yes,” said Solas. “Next summer.”

“Marriage is a gift,” said Rebecca. “It is also a job. The two of you look the part.”

“I hope so,” said Sene.

“Where will you live?” she said. The question, like an echo. “Do you have a home? Skyhold, perhaps? Or, do you still migrate?” she looked at Sene, in earnest. She asked very few questions about Solas or his background, oddly. It was almost as if she knew not to.

“My clan is not migratory,” said Sene, sipping her coffee. “Solas and I—we live at Skyhold, currently, though we haven’t both been there at the same time for over a month, and I suppose that is not forever. Our lives are rather...hectic at the moment.”

“A man and a woman like the two of you should not live in a castle like that one,” said Rebecca. “Especially not now, with a wedding on the horizon. You must live together, get to know one another as more than comrades, more than lovers. You must become partners in the domestic sense. Do you know what I mean?"

"I think so," said Sene. "Yes."

"I have seen pencil drawings of your fortress, Skyhold. Some of the refugees in the village, they’ve been there. It’s so big. Beautiful, but so big. You’ll get lost in one of the corners, I expect, and there are too many others there, solving all your problems for you. In any case, who has a need for all that space in a marriage?”

Solas laughed. The woman was forward, cheeky, but he understood this so well, it was nearly unnerving. “That is a good point.”

“We haven’t really talked about it,” said Sene. She looked around then, at the prairie grasses and feral farm fields. The sky was a heady blue. The clouds were like streamers. “How did you and your husband settle on this place?”

“We just stumbled upon it one day,” said Rebecca. She did not eat anything. She did sip periodically from a tin cup filled with water. “You know, I have been trying to sell it for near on a year.”

"You have?” said Solas. “How come?”

Rebecca sighed. “My husband died a few years back. He was an old man. Older than me by some years. Since then, I’ve lived here alone.”

“I’m sorry,” said Sene, very serious.

Rebecca smiled. “You're lovely. I am quite all right. We had one daughter. She lives back in Highever with her husband. He’s a fisherman. They just had their second son.”

“Congratulations,” said Solas.

“Thank you,” said Rebecca.

“Are you hoping to move back there?” said Sene. “To be with her?”

“Yes,” said the woman. “But after the Blight, the floods came, and then the Breach, and then the demons. Nobody wanted to buy in Crestwood for a very long time. I’ve been thinking about getting back out there, now that the Inquisition has moved in, and the tides have lowered, trying to get it on the market for something respectable. It is a good house. There must be someone.” She drank some water. She looked out at the long fields of green and yellow grass. Her face was beautiful and aged, like leather and like a jewel all at once. Her eyes were a dark brown. Her hair was white. Her ears were long and flat. She looked at Sene. “What do you think?”

“Me?”

“Yes. Perhaps the Inquisition has some insight into the real estate situation in Crestwood.”

“People are moving in,” said Solas. “That is a certainty.”

“What about the two of you?” said Rebecca.

"The two of us?" said Sene.

“Yes. Are you moving in? Would you like to buy my house? I’d give you a good price.” She smiled, close-lipped, very knowing as she sipped from her cup.

Sene and Solas experienced a moment of perfect happenstance. They looked at each other, just the two of them, and it was like holding hands at the edge of the earth. As usual. But here, the earth was round and sun-soaked, and it seemed to stretch on forever in amber fields. It was familiar and new all at once, a vast terrain of possibilities.

Solas folded his hands on the table. Sene watched him entertain the thought, and she felt herself entertaining it as well. "That is a tremendous offer," said Solas. "Are you serious?"

"Come at me with your own offer," said Rebecca, setting her cup down on the table. She was very serious. "How much would you pay for a home like this? Inquisitor, Ser Solas. Because if I must sell it, and I must, I would love nothing more than to sell it to a young couple who just happened past one day, and who will fill it with love. Does that make sense?"

Home is where you lay your hat.

"It does," said Sene. It really does.  
 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dear readers,
> 
> We are getting very close to the end. I promise that I will warn you before it arrives. Not quite yet, but I just wanted to let you know. Since this monster has grown and grown and grown--you are all some of my favorite people. Thanks for sticking with me. <3
> 
> -gala


	59. Deconstructing Sene

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It is not always easy, convincing Sene of her reality.

_1\. Purpose_

They camped four nights along the River Dane, hiking south at a steady pace. They avoided the North Road so as to keep a low profile, a signature decision for Sene, and crossed the narrow of Lake Calenhad on horseback into the Hinterlands on the fifth night. There were no mirrors in Ferelden, no wormholes or magical means of transportation. They had to take the long way home, but the Inquisition was a heavy, organized presence this far south of the Waking Sea, and there was infrastructure for them already in place, everywhere. The camps were outfitted, staffed, and protected. The Mage/Templar conflict had deflated into nothing more than the occasional roadside scuffle, and the worst threat in these parts had, rather typically, become bears and bandits, who often managed to keep each other busy, giving civilians a much needed rest. Redcliffe was near, and it was growing. A mage outpost, it also drew a considerable amount of city and Dalish elves.

It was late in the night, tucked into a large tent in an Inquisition camp along the river, while Sene fletched arrows made of bone, that Solas told her he wanted to visit Abelas. The Druana clan lived on a dairy and grain farm not far from the village, and he did not know the next time they’d be back.

“I need to check on him, Sene,” said Solas, very serious, lying on his back as he stared up at the ceiling. He’d put a few butterflies up there for light. Sene had one perched on her shoulder as well. “This all—all of it it still feels like my responsibility, at least until I see otherwise. I need to tell him about Mythal.”

Sene looked up then. She became nervous, her fingers still and nimble against the feathers of the arrow. “Will you be okay?” she said.

It was an odd question, serious for her. He turned onto his side so that he could see her face, resting his head in his hand. She’d drawn inward these past few days since he’d removed the anchor. She tried to pretend otherwise, but she was pensive, thinking about what it meant for her. She’d started doing this thing he’d never noticed before, too—pressing her right thumb into her left palm like she was trying to dig out the center. She was aimless, or that was what he could gather. So much of what she’d become had been tied up in that anchor, but it would have killed her. He reminded himself of that. He had to. “Of course I’ll be okay, vhenan. Do not worry.”

“He calls me Ise,” she said, changing the subject, quickly. She’d stopped her fletching completely. She was smoothing the bone of the arrowheads between her fingers now, studying their depth. “I just want you to know.”

“He likes you,” said Solas, looking at her.

She glanced at him, surprised. “I think he did,” she said. “Before. I think seeing me again solved that for him. He had built me up to something…more angelic in his mind. Maybe.” She sighed, embarrassed, pushed the hair off her face and tied it in a knot at the back of her head. “I don’t know.”

“Did he make you any paper cranes?” said Solas, very simply.

This surprised her. “Yes,” she said. “At the Gull and Lantern. Why?"

“That means he likes you,” said Solas. He smiled. "You're very dense sometimes, vhenan."

“It didn’t mean anything,” she said.

“It’s okay,” he said, sighing. “I understand why he would like you, Sene, and it’s more than just what you might have represented to him in the beginning, when you showed him a bit of kindness in Crestwood. He’s a twenty-five year old man who likes women, and you’re a pretty woman, and you smell good, and you have a nurturing demeanor that will always allure men of a certain hard sensibility, because you give them leave to let go, and yet somehow, you also understand the difficulties of fighting in a war. That is a rare combination.” He was careful not to psychoanalyze her. He knew how she didn't like to be the center of attention like that. “Remember the Commander? He used to like you, too.”

She just raised her eyebrows. “And every woman, and probably as many men, in Thedas would like your ass between the sheets,” she said. She drew quiet. “One woman in particular.”

He gave her a look. “Mythal?”

She shrugged, went back to her fletching.

“I don’t think so, Sene," said Solas. "Believe me. At my mother’s house I made sure she knew everything. I had to.”

Sene just nodded. She seemed to have very little interest in pressing the issue. “What will Abelas do,” she said, “when he learns.”

Solas sighed. “I don’t know,” he said. “Based on what you told me, he seems to be hanging onto the end very hard. The fact that he erased so much knowledge from the Well—that’s worrisome.”

“What happened to him?” said Sene.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, the stuff with Mythal—I know all of that. Between you and him and her. But it seems like he was sad before that. Like something really bad happened, something deep. Like, it makes him fearful.”

Solas became very serious. He thought hard on the matter. So much eluded his memory those days, but it was there. He just had to trust himself and go digging. “His family was killed,” he said, retracing his steps, a discovery.

“They were?” said Sene.

“Yes,” said Solas. “They lived in a place called the Backwater by the Sea, very near to where my mother lives now. It was rural, poor. It had been neutral territory for a long time, but at some point, it became contested, so Mythal and I took it under protective capacity. This pissed off some of our enemies. In retaliation for our unwillingness to _share,_ they burnt it to the ground. Every last farm.”

“What the fuck?” said Sene. “Who is _they_?”

“Elgar’nan,” said Solas. He shook his head quietly, swimming in a black and distant sea. “It is not what you thought it was, Sene. I just—these were gods, perhaps, but not benevolent gods. At least not in the end.”

“His whole family?” said Sene. She seemed disinterested in the Pantheon discussion. She was a pragmatist. She cared about the here and the now. The people and their hearts and minds.

“His parents, grandparents, and three younger sisters, I believe,” said Solas. “They were elfroot farmers. Not long after that, we made him Commander of the Sentinels. He was only eighteen.”

“That is very young," said Sene, drawing inward. "It's not fair."

“What is not fair?” said Solas. “That his family died, or that he was put into such a high position of power at such a young age.”

“Both.”

“You were made Inquisitor when you were only nineteen, Sene,” said Solas. “We’ve talked about this. Cole was only seventeen when he showed up at Haven. Sera was twenty. I was dragged into Mythal’s war at the same exact age you were when you were dragged into this one. We may have been born millennia apart, vhenan, but we’ve inherited the same sort of world.”

“Why?”

He looked at her, hard. It was a massive question. “I don’t know.”

She was ruminating. She seemed tired, blue, but frenetic, like she wanted to hit something. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know these questions are stupid.”

“They’re not stupid.”

“It’s just that sometimes, I feel like I need to ask them. I sit here, and I’ve made all these decisions, and people have died. I don’t understand— _why._ And now the anchor is gone, and I don’t even have a functional reason to sit in my stupid throne, something to use as rationale. I’m the Inquisitor for no reason other than that Deshanna sent me to spy on Fereldan relations and the monetary situation regarding agricultural real estate. How fucking stupid. I’m just a farmer’s daughter, Solas. I’m not supposed to be special. And now I’m not, like it was supposed to be all along, but it feels wrong somehow.”

“Not special? Come on, Isene.”

His response seemed to toss her off a cliff. “Don’t call me Isene.”

He ignored her. “You achieved your vallaslin when you were eleven years old, did you not? You’re an incredible huntress, an incredible tracker. You’re smart, too, and strong, you’ve read everything, and you’re a good tactician whether you want to be believe it or not.”

“I am not a good tactician, Solas. _You’re_ a good tactician. I just listen to you and do what you say.”

“I’ve had years of experience, vhenan.” He smirked. “That’s a fact. Take comfort in knowing that you’ve learned from best, and you’ve done very well.”

She shoved him in the shoulder. “Shh.”

“Your father is more than a farmer as well,” said Solas. “By the way. Let’s be serious. He’s a historian and a verified spelunker. What you’re saying is all valid, and I understand your conundrum. But try to see yourself clearly, for what you're actually worth. That’s very important, especially now.”

“Whatever,” she said.

“Whatever?”

“I just don’t know.”

“That is fine,” said Solas. He fished around in his pocket, came up with a toothpick, set it between his teeth. “You are allowed to not know things.”

“Maybe,” she said. She closed her eyes and dropped her head back dramatically. “I want to hunt a rabbit or something. Something stupid and fast. I feel all weird.”

“Go ahead,” said Solas. “I’ll be right here. I’ll wait up.”

She looked at him. “Seriously?”

“Well, yes. Unless I fall asleep. Then I’ll be asleep.”

“So you won’t stay up?”

“Do you want me to come with you?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“Good?”

“Yes,” said Solas. “Good. I’m not much for hunting, vhenan. At least not animals. You know this.”

“Why not?”

“The same reason you’re not much for art.”

“I like art.”

“Yes, you like to look at art, but you don’t like to make art,” said Solas. “Meanwhile I’ll thoroughly enjoy eating whatever animal you track down and shoot with your arrows, but I don’t enjoy that sort of dirty work. You do. That’s you.”

She had a moment then, in which she realized they were not the same person. It should have been obvious, but Sene had never been in a relationship before, not really. Solas was her first love, her only love, and everything they did, they did so thoroughly together. Even the time they spent apart, they’d spent it apart doing their jobs, which were connected. They had always seemed the same.

“What’s the matter?” he said. She must have looked like a deer in crosshairs. He had pulled a book out of his pack. It was something about the Qun. “Sene?”

“What’s that?” she said, gesturing to the book, tucking a few loose curls behind her ears.

He glanced down. “This is a book about the Qunlat language.”

“Are you trying to learn?” she said.

He studied her. “I already know a great deal,” he said. “I’m just brushing up. This particular book focuses on militaristic vocabulary. Why?”

“Miltaristic? Really?”

“Yes,” he said. “Would you like to learn some.”

She scootched closer to him, folded her legs beneath her. “Yes, I would,” she said, smiling. “Teach me something.”

He squinted into the pretty space of her eyes and sort of smiled and shook his head. “You’re like a tornado.”

“And I love you,” she said. “Now shut up and teach me a thing.”

“ _Shut up_ and _teach me a thing_ are contradictory statements.”

“Quit parsing my words and teach me a thing.”

He sighed, dropped the book open in his lap. It was heavy and leather bound, a gift from Bull. He flipped to one of the pages in the middle and cleared his throat. “ _Ebasit kata_ ,” he said, his voice very deep. “ _Itwa-ost_.”

Sene laughed. “Those are funny words.”

“Who are you, Sera?”

“What do they mean?” she said.

“They essentially mean: _The battle is over. Time to die._ ”

“Fuck,” said Sene. She got closer to the pages, like that might make the meaning somehow clearer. “That’s intense.”

“You’ve seen Bull in battle,” said Solas. “Everything about the Qun is a little intense, at least per your standards. This is sort of an old saying, largely contextual. I’ve heard Bull say it to dragons.”

“The battle is over,” said Sene, deepening her voice, mimicking Solas’s cadence. “Time to die.” She looked at him. He was so handsome there, in the light from the butterflies, and just very smart. She wanted to eat him.

Instead, she just took the toothpick out of his mouth, and she put her hands on his cheeks, and she kissed him. It was simple at first. He met her kiss with his own kiss. She was surprised by his commitment to the moment, as it had come out of nowhere. But she took the book out of his lap and closed it and set it away. It became something else then, the kiss, between them. Solas smoothed his hands into her hair. He pressed the tips of her ears between his fingers in a way that made her shiver. She broke her mouth from his, looked up into the familiar contours of his face, the eyes like a mild winter. They could be soft, too. His eyes. They could be mean and scary, but they could be so soft, like he cared so much. He cared about everything. He felt everything. 

“I thought you wanted a hunt,” he breathed as he tucked the hair behind her ears.

She shrugged, lifted the shirt over his head, slowly. He obliged. She placed her hand on his bare chest where he no longer wore that wolf jaw, ever. It still sat in a drawer at Skyhold, a relic more than anything else.  

“I miss this,” she said. Everything slowed down, like the night, stopping on a dime, and all you could hear outside where the crickets and the distant rustlings of soldiers on guard. “It’s so simple. Just us, in the wild. I miss it.”

She was whisper smooth, and made of heavy eyelids and a quiet conviction. She wanted him. He nodded, because he wanted her, too, and he missed this, too. It had been a long time, since they were animals, the two of them, alone, outside. _Frolics._ That’s what Dorian would have called it.

“ _Isalan ma gara suin em, Solas,”_ she said. She had not said it like that since the beginning.

It undid him. He held her hand against his chest, tightly, and he cupped her chin in his hand. "Okay." She was his.

He went about undressing her piece by piece. It was methodical and learned and only a little rushed. Now that they knew where they were going, and they were out here, in the outdoors, the underbrush of existence, there was no time constraint. He pulled the cotton shirt over her head, unwrapped the linen from her ankles and her feet and discarded it to a pile by the door. He wanted nothing between them. Solas could be gentle to the point of devastation when he wanted to. He could draw out the moments and make them last, shimmering on the surface until he took aim, descended. She yielded to him, his patience, long-legged and free, yielded to his hands, and he pressed her onto her back and told her to be still as he touched her. She wanted to be devoured, so he held her there, one hand on her chest to keep her in place, one quiet in the home between her legs, building along and inside of her at a _gentle_ pace until she arched and lost control. Her breath ragged, and her eyes closed, and her breathing full of escape, she came, clawing at the bearkskin mat beneath her, her face flushed and half hidden in the red nest of her hair as she peaked out and found his eyes.

He watched, content, brought her down, let her settle, breathing, until the stillness became too much for them both. He dragged his hand up her torso, let his knuckles linger at the curve of her neck, the cut of her jaw, and soon, she sat up, slowly, reading the moment, and he adjusted to his knees above her, and then he pushed the hair out of her face and held it tight at the base of her skull as she undid the lacing at his waist and took him into her hand, and then into her mouth and pleasured him, too. Sene was less gentle, as a rule. But she was attentive and eager as she swallowed him up, and he dropped his head back, used to this part of her, her speed, how she could be both tender and a little brute in the way she handled him, and how he liked it that way, and he closed his eyes and felt nothing but the heat and the wet and the speed of her. The tight and perfect soft spaces. He could smell her, heady and profound, filling the tent, and he leaned forward to feel his hands down the length of her spine until she moaned against him, and he made no noises but to tell her that it felt good. _That feels good, vhenan._ They took their time.

At some point, he nudged and guided her off of him, turned her around, poised on her hands and knees, and he eased himself inside, slowly, then faster, and then he latched onto her hips and proceeded to fuck her into oblivion. Studying each freckle on her back, and how they were all just these little mouths welcoming him, bringing him home. How many times had they danced this dance? It didn’t matter. He’d put a spell on the tent so that nobody could hear them. He told her this, pressed his lips to her dampened neck and told her she could say his name. He could hear it, trembling in the back of her throat. _Solas._ She said it like a whisper. He told her she could say it as loud as she wanted. But she demurred beneath him, and she hooked her hand around his neck so that he stayed there with his mouth on her ear, breathing, and she just said, _I like the quiet. Solas._ He emptied inside her and lost his grip when she said it again, and as he did, she urged him further.  _Ara vhenan,_ she said.  _I love you._

Through his release, they crumpled to the mat. Breathing heavy, just a pile of naked limbs and wet. Solas lifted the spell, and the wind outside rattled the leather of the tent as the butterflies still blinked like little stars in the corners. Sene watched them. She had to get up to pee, but for a little while, she just watched them. 

Sene remembered, as she lie in his arms far away from the organized world, how one of those butterflies had saved her life once. Solas’s butterflies. She wondered if they, too had memory, and if they'd made a home in her. She wondered, catching her breath beside him, she felt very good, and she felt very warm, and she felt very right. She wondered what they could see.

 

_2\. Worry_

“Perhaps we should have sent word ahead,” said Solas where they stood at the gate, hands deep in his pockets.

“It’s okay,” said Sene. “It will be okay.”

There were fireflies in the grain fields at the Druana farm outside of Redcliffe, a sign of spring. It looked like rift magic. Solas felt Sene, very deep inside herself, grasping after the moment, studying, preparing to see Abelas again. Solas knew there had been a strange pull between them, ever since that night in Crestwood, but he also knew Abelas, the man's compulsions, and he knew Sene's as well. Abelas needed to be cared for. Sene was very good at caring. Sene and Solas had woken up that morning, and they were tasked with the day, no matter how hard they’d slept, how deep inside her he’d gotten in that tent on the river. Sene braided her hair over her shoulder, studying her reflection in a faded mirror she'd had to borrow off one of the woman soldiers at the camp. Solas dismantled the tent, rolled it up, even as the requisition scout told him he did not have to. They spent the day hiking, and they arrived at the Druana farm well after sunset without speaking much. They were tired and thirsty. And now, Sene was tall and concerned where they stood at the gate, right on the edge of something, just like Sene tended to be whenever the choices that lie before her were unclear.

She liked the wild, the untamed private moments of their lives. He looked forward to living with her, really living with her, and the freedom that would entail. But she was working through something, after the anchor, and what it was was not always entirely clear. The layers of Sene were all mixed up, he thought. They came into focus, and then they whisked away, and because she swam so freely on the surface of her emotions, it was not always apparent how deep they went. He knew that she was nothing like him. She did not carry around the weight of her fears. She purged them, one after the other, but there were a lot of them these days, and a lot of heavy changes weighing down on her, compounding what was already there. One of these changes was him, he knew, and his anxieties. She'd once yelled at him for trying to carry her sadness as his own, a means of protecting her, but she did the same thing. She just wore it better. She was an emotionally agile woman, and she didn't realize it, but this past year of war and intense transformation had left her a little tangled.

Still, her hair was braided back off her face, and she was pretty and mild in the light from the Hinterlands full moon. She began to massage her thumb into her palm again, hard.

“Vhenan,” he said, very deep, in charge. “Why are you worried.”

She looked at him, surfaced, like she hadn’t even heard what he said, and yet she did. “I’m worried?” she said.

It was entirely weird. He raised his eyebrows. It took him by surprise. “I think so,” he said. “Don't you?”

“No,” she said, her freckles defined from all the sun at the treehouse, and then the Lavellan farm and then the river hike from Crestwood. “I just—okay, yes. I’m worried.”

“About what?”

She just looked at him. “About you,” she said, point blank. "About what will happen."

It was honest. The honesty, at least, was a relief. He could only sigh, and flex his jaw, and allow this. He nodded. He understood, though he didn't agree, and he didn’t have any recourse for her, not at the moment. 

So she just looked at her boots and held his hand as they waited. Her touch was always solid and always committed to him. She was very loyal. So he took a deep breath and counted on her speed. Sene was fast. He tried to think of the facts instead. They’d put that house into escrow, in Crestwood. That was the truth. They planned to buy it, paid in full. Cash on the barrel. Rebecca the elf who owned it trusted them with her gut. The pay-out, they promised, would be covered in full by the Inquisition. The cost was so little, compared to anything they’d ever imagined they’d need to buy a home together, it was the least they could do. Sene loved that house. She was deeply enchanted by the acres of purple flowers and feral farm fields full of daisies and dandelion weeds. She also liked the prospect of living in Ferelden, being within a few days’ ride to Skyhold. The entirety of the property was twenty acres. Twenty acres of fullblown, free and beautiful land in Crestwood. A watering hole. A chicken coop and a barn. It was going to be okay.

At somet point, they were led to a large tent made for gatherings to wait for Abelas and El inside the Druana farm. The hour was late, and they’d already retired, so it was going to take a moment. Inside the tent there was a huge light fixture all done up with candles hanging from the ceiling, clearly enchanted. The Druana clan Keeper was a mage, and there were whispers that, beyond marriage, Abelas might become his First. There were not many magical Druanas. Everybody was proud. Solas and Sene heard about all of this very quickly. The clan was glad for their company and eager to share. They knew all about Abelas the ancient elf. The truth had come out, it was real. The Keeper had greeted Sene and Solas himself, staff in hand, full of reverence and secrecy. _We would never betray one of our own,_ he said. And he also hoped that, the next day, he could show them around the farm personally. _One of our own,_ he’d said. It seemed that Abelas, too, was engaged to be married.

Inside the tent, they were left alone now. In a little while, a young woman named Uvun came inside with a tray of fruit and a bottle of wine and four cups. “I'll go to fetch them right away,” she said, inviting them to sit at the wooden table. Sene and Solas obliged. Uvun lit a lantern and poured them each a cup of wine and asked if there was anything else she could bring them.

“No thank you,” said Sene, poised. “The table is lovely as is.”

The girl just nodded. “It’s a pleasure to meet you both,” she said. She curtsied for Sene, and then, she looked at Solas. He had been drinking deeply, tired from the day, and he did not notice at first, the awe with which she displayed as she watched him.

When he looked up, over the rim of his cup, he saw her expression and became confused. “What’s the matter?” he said, very earnest. He thought he had done something wrong.

“I—” She looked at Sene and whispered, “He’s very cute. Just like the papers claim.”

Sene smiled. Solas sighed, used to this sort of thing. He smirked at Sene and then looked at the girl with a kind of sweetness in his eyes. "I thank you," he said.

“He's like a great big puppy," said Uvun. She was young and a little strange. "Don't you think?"

This made Solas laugh, because it was familiar. He wiped his mouth on a linen napkin and he looked at Sene. "She sounds like you, vhenan," he said. "Have you been marketing me as such? The Tall Red Elf and her puppy?"

“A puppy?” said Sene. This seemed to make her nervous. “Of course not."

Solas then returned his attention to Uvun. He had to shake his head out a little, get back to the moment at hand. “Thank you for the wine—what is your name again?”

“Uvun,” she said.

“Uvun.” He thought about it. This seemed to snap him into place. “Uvun?”

“Yes.”

“El is your older sister.”

“Yes.”

“I know your brothers,” said Solas. “Lahlas and Datishan.”

“Yes, you do.”

“They did me a great service once, about a year ago. I was lost, and they helped guide my home. Are they here?”

“Yes, they are. But they’ve gone out for a hunt.”

Solas drank a bit more of his wine, cleared his throat. “I’d like to see them, before we leave. If possible.”

“Will you be staying the night on the farm?”

Solas glanced at Sene.

“Hopefully,” she said. “I think so?”

“Very well,” said Uvun. She sort of curtsied a little. “Ser Solas. Inquisitor. I'll send Abelas and El straight away.” And then she left the tent.

Sene sighed. She looked down at her wine, self-conscious. There was a long silence. Solas poured more wine. Sene drank stiffly. They said nothing for a time. But then.

“What’s wrong?” Sene said at some point.

"Nothing," said Solas. "Why?"

Sene shrugged. She seemed unsure.

So he looked at her. It was like a chorus. “You keep asking me that today,” he said. "I may be cute, but I am not actually a puppy, vhenan."

“I know that," she said, staring at her hands.

He studied her, and then he studied the color of the wine. A very pale, cool yellow. He took a deep breath, and then he squared up with her. "Do you?" he said.

This jarred her. "Excuse me?"

“Isene,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I’m going to talk,” he said. “Are you ready to listen?”

She swallowed some air. “I think so.”

“Good,” he said, very direct. He turned toward her a little. They were on the same side of the table, and he had given up on his restraint, and so he had that old steel look about him. He hadn’t used it in a while, his unbending focus. He’d used to be much more stoic with her, much more intense. He’d used to use it a lot, especially in the beginning. But when the floor fell out from beneath them sometime after Mythal came back, he’d lost his edge and all recourse. He was broken, and he had wronged her.

But time had passed. Things had changed. Progress mattered.

“Do you remember last night when you asked me if I was going to be okay, seeing Abelas again?” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

“I said I was fine, and you seemed to believe me. But I’m not sure you actually did.”

“Solas—”

“A lot has happened,” he said, ignoring her. “With you and me. I remember. For a long time, you were the sun, Sene. How I worshiped you, an old tendency of mine that I came to terms with, with your help. You then helped me put myself back together again after a lengthy confrontation with my past. Remember?”

“Yes, I do.”

“But I’m here, telling you now, that I'm okay,” he said. “I promise. I am okay. I can see Abelas. I can talk to and about Mythal. I’m not reliving it anymore. There are echoes, of course. My memory is imperfect, and sometimes, it folds in on itself. But I’m aware of that now, and I know what to do when it happens. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said, but she said it like a question. She nodded, but he still wasn’t sure she believed him.

“You’re very worried,” he went on, folding his hands on the table, “after the anchor, and over Abelas. I feel that you're very worried, and I just want to understand why. I think you’re trying to locate your purpose—that’s what we talked about last night, and that’s making this worse. For a long time, a great deal of your purpose seemed to be wrapped up in dealing with me, and my purpose, my memory, a lot of tragedy, because you love me, and I needed your help. Because that’s what we do. We help each other, like last night. I helped you.”

“Yes,” she said. “You help me all the time.”

"And that's the thing," said Solas.

"What's the thing?"

“The puppy thing," said Solas. "Being called a puppy, it does not bother me. I don’t mind being your puppy, vhenan. You may call me that, like you have before. It means nothing to me beyond a term of endearment. But I’m worried that it means something else to _you_. On a subconscious level. That I am something to coddle, something innocent that, in all of its weakness, needs to be protected, and saved. That's why you became uncomfortable before, when Uvun said it. Am I right?”

She seemed both miffed but entirely aware. She nodded, her hair seeming to grow and stick up out of her braid, a little more with each and every one of his words. An animated, full blown part of her. It seemed to have an agency all its own. "Maybe."

“That's what I thought,” he continued, full of wisdom, and earnest, making her listen, but his voice was soft, gentle. He took her hand. “In this partnership, we must take care of each other, Sene. It’s true. You knew this before I did. Our lives are merciless at times, and dangerous, and we must be vigilant. I know that I have made myself vulnerable to you in ways that have changed me and have changed things between us. But that is because I know that I can, without your judgment, and I trust you. It’s why I love you, and why I need you. Not because I’m weak. I know that I am about to experience a rather serious encounter with the past, yet again. Abelas is my oldest friend, and for me, that is no small ordeal, but you need to trust me. I can handle this now. Just like you can handle your hunting and your daily struggle with who you are. I am here to help you. But there is no need to hover. I can sense that you feel you must hover, protect me, especially since I broke my ribs in that dragon fight, blew my head out on the ground and woke up to find the world changed.”

“No shit, Solas,” said Sene, coming free. She broke the moment, withdrew her hand. Her voice was thin. She seemed frantic, like she might cry. “You almost died. I fucking—my Aunt Yara asked about that scar on the side of your head. She asked, and I didn’t know how to feel about it, or what to say. I had to let Morrigan do the talking for me. Again.”

“I didn’t die,” he said. “Sene, I didn’t die. Feel whatever you need to feel. Morrigan is your friend. I didn’t die.”

“But you could have. And you will one day. And in the Emprise du Lion, you woke up, and you were blacking out—and then you went to the Darvaarad without me. And Mythal was being so…weird. I keep worrying about you, your new power, her, and now this stuff with Ghilan'nain, and Abelas. I don’t know how to handle it. I don't know how.”

“Yes you do,” he said. “You do, Sene. You just need to trust yourself. And you need to trust me.”

She sort of sank a little, but then she puffed back up, confused again. "I trust you."

“Good. Because how do you think we got here?”

“The Hinterlands?”

“No,” he said. “Here. Engaged to be married. Do you think I take that sort of thing lightly? Do you think I would have asked you if I didn’t truly believe that I was capable of handling that commitment? That _you_ were?”

“No.”

“Because I still think about how many ways I let you down in the beginning, Sene, and how far we’ve come. Particularly with the miscarriage. I need to make that clear.”

“The miscarriage?” she said. 

“Everything with Mythal—that’s different,” he went on. “That was me, repressing. I’m still sorry it all happened the way that it did, and my mind is still healing, I’ll admit. But it’s not the same. Your miscarriage, after _you_ almost died—that was not the past. That was just ours. I kept that from you consciously, because I was afraid of hurting you after what happened. I thought I needed to protect you. But you explained to me why that was wrong. I should not have done that. It was not my place to determine whether or not you needed to be protected. It was yours to live and to feel, no matter how awful. I’m so incredibly sorry for that, Sene. For underestimating you like that. I just need to make sure that you know.”

She stared back at him. The light in the tent was dim and molten, like the lanterns had imbued the air with some hazy enchantment. “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m okay, Solas.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’m sure. I said I was okay. I’m okay.”

“Then I believe you,” he said. “And I’m okay, too. I promise. Do you believe me?”

She nodded, very quiet, seeing his reasoning as it came together, piece by piece. “Yes,” she said. “I do. But you need to promise you’ll tell me if something is really wrong, ever again, okay? If your head starts floating away? Or you start feeling like—like the past is coming for you. Like if it ever really hurts or gets scary.”

“I promise. And you’ll tell me, too. If it ever really hurts. Your arm, where the anchor once lived. Your heart. Your nerves.”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

He smiled, just a half-smile, to reassure her that he wasn’t angry. This was not about being angry. He was losing his breath. People are not solved in a single conversation, Solas knew this, but what’s important is that they agree to communicate their fears and troubles at all costs. That is what makes love last. It was how he and his mother had survived on their own for so many years. It was how he and Mythal had ruled, had run their rebellion, how they almost won.

It was not a constant, it turns out, this dynamic between them. That is what Sene thought. It was shifting, and it made Sene think. It made her think about the beginning—the very beginning—right after the Conclave, on the rooftops of Haven, and at Skyhold when she felt so stupid and so young and so unsure all the time, and he took care of _her_ , and he taught her things, well before they were romantic, and he encouraged and molded her to be the greatest version of herself. It had always been an exchange, a fluctuation. When one was weak, the other grew strong. This was just one chapter of their lives together, and it was coming to a close. She was relieved to start the next, but now a little embarrassed. Because she was Sene, living always in the moment. The conversation had gone on a long time, and she hadn’t meant for this.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s okay,” he said.

He squeezed her hand. He kissed her forehead, and she blushed as they waited, drinking their wine, for El and Abelas to appear.

 

_Meanwhile_

Abelas sat scraping away at the tip of a spear. They used a lantern for light, hanging from the ceiling of the tent by a thick wire, and every so often, El would hum as she sat, mending a patch to her favorite blue apron, and he would smile, before bedtime. A ritual like any other. They found comfort in the expectation that the day would end with them together. Every night, no matter what the day became, Abelas and El entangled, sealing away their pastoral quotidian in the space of a single leather tent.

“Leena is pregnant,” she said, a needle between her teeth. “Again. She can’t help herself.”

“Leena should do what makes her happy,” said Abelas.

El looked up from her sewing, intrigued. “She’s never happy when she’s pregnant,” she said. “She’s a grumpy bitch.”

“Perhaps it’s not about the pregnant part. Perhaps it’s about the baby part.” He sighed, oddly calm. “Then again, how would I know.”

El watched him. She felt her heart fill up like a coccoon. “I’d have your baby,” she said, smiling, like a dare. “And I’d hope that he’d grow to be big and shiny. Like you. A farm boy with a delicate accent and strong hands.”

Abelas had paused his scraping and was now studying his spearwork. “Or perhaps a farm girl,” he said, giving her a long look. “With a magical knack for rainfall.”

He had changed so much. She wanted to tell the world about their love, but she had learned that with Abelas, platitudes were confusing and a little scary. He didn’t always understand. “Either one,” she said, smiling. “In the meantime, you make a very mean spear.”

“There is nothing mean about my spears, vhenan. They’re for fishing.”

“Ask the fish,” she said. “I bet they’d tell you differently.”

“You’re funny,” he said, but he did not laugh.

She blushed.

Somebody rattled at the tent door then. They’d hung a few bone chimes out front, like a doorbell. Abelas had taught this to the clan. An old way.

“Abelas?” It was Uvun, El’s younger sister.

“Come in,” said Abelas.

He and El looked up as Uvun entered the tent. She was lythe and strong, fourteen years old with arms as long as her legs. “Sorry to disturb,” she said. She seemed embarrassed and out of breath. Their tent was far away, in the very back corner of the encampment, what amounted to probably five or six acres from the gate. 

“It’s okay,” said El. “What’s the matter? Are you out of breath?”

“Abelas, the Inquisitor is here,” said Uvun. She glanced at El, somewhat excited. “She is here with Ser Solas.”

El stopped her sewing. “The Inquisitor?”

“Yes.”

El glanced to Abelas, awaiting his reaction.

But he was was just staring at the girl, like he did not fully believe her. He set down the spear. “Are you sure?”

“Of course. The Inquisitor is unmistakable. Don’t you think? And so is Solas.” She smiled at El, as if El might know exactly what she was talking about.

But El did not look at her. She was fixed on her fiancé. He nodded, clear and firm. Resigned and bright with the truth, but a little frightened, and he stared at the floor of the tent in perfect silence. 

“Abelas?” said El.

Something broke somewhere on the surface of the evening. It had all been very lovely, his evenings with El and their ongoing patterns of calm, but now, a disturbance. A change. He came to. “Thank you,” he said to Uvun. “We’ll be right there.”

Uvun smiled, like she was nervous, and left the tent.

El took a very deep breath. The lantern flickered overhead. Abelas glanced at it once, and the candle stoked up. She put her hand on his shoulder, and she squeezed in solidarity and companionship, and she kissed him on the temple. “He came,” she said, trying to snap him out of it. “I told you he would come. Solas.”

“I did not believe you, El,” said Abelas, a confession. "I did not believe you."

Lovers in waiting, ending your daily routines as quiet, joint units in your private tents. What do you feel? What do you hear? How have you come to love each other. 

Abelas helped El to her feet, and she smoothed her dress and redid her hair, and she helped him straighten up at the collar. She was an upright girl, very direct in her intentions, and she wanted to look good for the Inquisitor. And for this night of mysteries. These were distinguished guests after all, and old friends. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Elven translation:
> 
> “Isalan ma gara suin em, Solas." - "Make love to me, Solas."
> 
>  
> 
> _***A song for Sene: "Set Out Running" by Neko Case ([spotify](https://open.spotify.com/track/2YlLidmlK70xP1uruM3Fqj), [youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYGod41gG9M&list=RDNYGod41gG9M&t=6))***_


	60. Pioneers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We never used to live this long.  
> We're pioneers, my dear, press on.  
> Move along.
> 
> -Case/Lang/Veirs, ["Supermoon"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDljUTAxyMo)

“Do you have cows on your farm?” said El. She wore a soft green tunic, and her hair was in a high, braided knot on her head. She was really pretty, thought Sene. Really pretty, in the way of a small animal, like a fox. Or like a green jewel. She was little, but she had fine hips and big hands for her delicate wrists. They stood in the barn, the two of them, and El had one of her hands on a sleeping milk cow, and Sene could not help but notice.

“We have several milk cows,” said Sene, “but just for the farm. My Aunt Yara churns a lot of butter, actually.”

“I suppose,” said El, smiling. “I would like to meet your Aunt Yara, trade techniques. But who needs to monetize dairy when you’ve got an entire distillery in your backyard? That makes sense.”

Sene blushed. The sentiment had been earnest, but it still made her itch. “It’s rather psychotic,” she said. “I think Solas has taken to them really well, especially my asshole father, but I tend to dread my family.”

“I understand that better than you might think.” El continued to pet the cow. This one, she’d said before, was named Matilda. Sene watched in mild awe. El had no ill will inside her, not as far as Sene could see. Every bone in her body seemed made of forgiveness, but Sene also knew this was a pitfall. No woman is so perfect, so pristine and so clean. We think they are, the ones just like us. We fear we are not as beautiful or as cool, collected.

Outside, you could hear the crickets and the bustle of a midnight patrol. This was not the Lavellan compound, but it was a farm in bandit country, after all.

“It means a lot that the two of you are here,” said El, tending to her cow. “To Abelas.”

“When did he tell you?” said Sene. “About—everything.”

El nodded. “Not long after that night in the tavern, actually, when he ran into you.”

Sene nodded, quietly. Suddenly very worried over that stupid paper crane.

But El seemed to read her mind. “I think he held a torch for you,” she said, “for a little while. It’s easy to understand.”

“Nothing ever happened between us,” said Sene, scuffing her boot across the earth. “We were only ever just friends.”

“I know that,” said El. “Don’t worry, Inquisitor. Whatever he was holding onto, he’s let it go by now. I promise.” She smiled, very cool and sweet with high, pink cheekbones. “He is a man of his efficiency, that is for certain. He is very good at processing when he chooses to. But he holds to Solas very tightly.”

“What do you mean?” said Sene.

“They seem to have a very complicated history,” said El. “Don’t you think?”

“Yes,” said Sene. “I do. But I don’t know Abelas like you do.”

El led them out of the barn and into the green moonlit sea of the Hinterlands. They took a walk down a quiet path between two grain fields. Fireflies made love in the foliage, and the wheat stalks whispered in the breeze. In the immediate distance, you could see the Druana farm watchtowers—two of them—and the night guards with their torches.

“I know nothing of soldiers and warriors,” said El after a little while, her hands cupped in front of her, like she was nervous. “Their temperaments. We don’t have that here. But you know what I’m talking about. You have experience.” She turned and looked right at Sene as they walked. She was eager. “Men work so hard to hide their ills. But they can heal, can’t they?”

Sene took her seriously. “Always,” she said.

“You’re one of them,” said El.

“One of who? A man?”

“No. A warrior. Do you need healing, Inquisitor?”

Sene almost laughed at this. It was overwhelming, the specificity. “I never really counted myself as a warrior, El,” she said.

“But you are,” said El. “You’ve fought in wars, on the front lines. You’ve saved villages, vanquished dragons.”

“I had help,” said Sene. “And I rarely saw the front lines, I assure you. It’s the same behind closed doors. I have help. Advisors, actual warriors and diplomats who knw what they’re doing.”

“Like Solas?” said El.

“Yes,” said Sene. “Like Solas.”

“So out of everything you’ve seen, everything you’ve done—these things don’t live inside you, still?” She was genuinely curious, but she demured. She drew very quiet in an instant.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m sorry, Inquisitor,” said El, looking at her leather shoes. “I should not pry. We hardly know each other.”

“It’s okay,” said Sene. “Because you’re right. It does—all of it lives in me, yes. I just don’t typically make a habit of sitting still long enough to let it settle in my bones.”

“What does that mean?” said El. “Doesn’t it build up? That can weaken you. That’s what happened to Abelas.”

“I know,” said Sene. “But that’s sort of what Solas is for. When I can’t get through it, he makes me stop, be still, feel things.”

El smiled. “Oh,” she said. “Of course. I apologize, Inquisitor.”

“You can just call me Sene.”

“Abelas, he calls you Ise.”

“You can call me Ise, too, if you want.”

“What do most people call you?”

Sene looked down at her hands. She had a couple small scars in her knuckles that she’d never really taken the time to notice before. “Most people call me Inquisitor,” she said. “Oddly enough. But my friends call me Sene.”

“Then I’ll call you Sene,” said El. “It is a nickname, right?”

“Right,” said Sene. “For Isene.”

“ _Like fire,_ ” said El. “Fitting, per your hair.”

“What does your name mean?” said Sene. “El. That must be short for something.”

“It’s short for El’u’leal.”

Sene gaver her a look. “Window?” She felt instantly guilty. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

El sighed. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “It’s weird, I know. I think my parents were farming elfroot back then.” She became wistful, swept away as she gathered her dark hair down from her braided knot, and she laid it in plaits around her shoulders. “Abelas likes it though. Sometimes, he just calls me that. _Window._ Just a window. I didn’t like it at first, but now, it’s sort of interesting. To be somebody’s window. You know?”

“That’s sweet,” said Sene.

“What does Solas call you?”

Sene was glad for this. This question, and this walk with a genuine farm girl who was about six inches shorter than her and yet she felt like a pillar of knowing. How far away, and yet how close she could be to the the sort of life where it all began.

“Solas has about fifty names for me,” said Sene. “Sene, vhenan, avise’ain, _Inquisitor._ Which one he uses, that usually says something about his state of mind.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” said Sene, looking out into this evening, this pastoral dream, “usually it’s just Sene. Or vhenan. That’s like, neutral. But when he really means it, it’s Isene. Like when he’s mad at me, or he’s proving a point. _Isene._ ” She mimicked his cadence. “That’s how I know he means business.”

El found this to be very funny. “Go on,” she said, combing her fingers through her hair. “Tell me more.”

 

The men were heavier, like leaden window panes. Clear as day, but impossible, and a part of them wanting to sink into the earth, their ancient weight too much for this world.

But filled with light.

“I had not thought of it,” said Abelas, leaning over the table with his head in his hands. The blond hair had come loose from the knot at the back of his head, sweeping along the table. He had not touched his wine. “Did you know? Then?”

“She never told me,” said Solas. “Neither did my mother. There was never any guarantee the magic would take, especially for Mythal. I think that’s why they kept it a secret. It is a shock, but do not overthink, Abelas. She is safe.”

“Your mother, too?” said Abelas. “Both of them?”

Solas nodded, drinking. He tried not to take too much.

“Are you all right?”

Solas looked at him, studied his murky eyes. It was not hard to be there, with him. It was easier than he’d thought, but the eyes were so strange, so pale in their green as they always had been, and the vallaslin still sang off him like an old omen. “Yes,” he said.

“I am trying not to be consumed by the images anymore,” said Abelas. “The ones I see, that I hear. It is dreaming, mostly. El says they’ll always be there, but that they will fade. She said it will not always be this hard to look at the images, once they’ve faded. But that the fading takes time.”

“El sounds very wise.”

“She is,” said Abelas. He seemed to bite down on something deep inside, gritting his teeth as he reached into his pocket for a rolling paper. He folded it quietly into the shape of an elephant. “We’re getting married. Did you know that?”

“Yes, we heard. Congratulations, Abelas.”

“Are you getting married?”

“Yes,” said Solas. “Sene and I are engaged as well.”

Abelas blinked, twice. “That’s very good.”

“Thank you.”

“When?”

“Not until next year,” said Solas.

“Next year?”

“Our lives are hectic,” said Solas. “With the Inquisition, the Veil. Everything has been very…hectic, up until now. We need more time.”

“You will live with her,” said Abelas. “You want to live with her first, alone. You would like to establish your domain. I think I know this about you, Solas.”

“Yes,” said Solas, smirking. “More or less, that is true. We just bought a house. Something small, but the land is wide open. A little like this. In Crestwood.”

“That is not terribly far,” said Abelas.

“I know,” said Solas. “When is your wedding, Abelas.”

“Next month,” said Abelas. “El is frenzied. She keeps going into the village and buying spools of brightly colored ribbon. I am certain there are hundreds of yards of ribbon stashed in the pantry. She says she’s going to tie ribbons all over the entire farm. She’s very excited.”

“And you?”

“I am humbled,” said Abelas. He set the elephant to life. It walked around the table. It made a little elephant noise. It seemed to be searching for something. “Will you come to our wedding, with Ise?” he said. “Will you stand beside me?”

Solas smiled at the familiarity of it all. The warmth. He nearly got lost, but he had enough anchors to hold him now. Memories came in these little bits and pieces, and some of them were sharp, but this one was not. He and Abelas in those stupid fucked bars of Arlathan.

 _Girls like presents,_ Solas told him once. _They like the little things._ They’d been drinking whiskey in some old bar casino called the Pale Dreaming on Winter Street. It had never closed, not even after the city went to shit, and they sat there, as they so often did, looking at the candles in the shapes of trees on the walls, wearing their matching vallaslin of the woman who loved them. Solas was always on about gifts with Abelas. Gifts, gifts. It was no secret, but it was a secret weapon.

 _Little things. Like your butterflies?_ said Abelas. He was eighteen and in some ways, wise to the world and its shitty disposition. In others, he was very green and very eager. _I’ve seen you make butterflies for Mythal._

 _Yes, you have,_ said Solas. He snapped his fingers. A butterfly came to life in the air. It was small and pink but translucent, like the blue light from a candle. The serving girl, she stopped to regard its cool and crystalline grace. Like the city itself.

 _That’s lovely,_ she said.

Solas smiled. She passed.

 _The butterflies are just an example,_ said Solas as the butterfly slipped away into the ether. _It can be anything. It can be a piece of paper. It’s just a symbol. What matters is that it is from you._

What matters is that it is from you. Abelas had always liked paper.

Now, he was older. The apocalypse had done a number on them both.

“Yes,” said Solas, present as the evening, drinking his wine. “We will be there, and I will stand beside you.”

Abelas was grateful. They each took a moment to drink. Abelas refilled their glasses. “Does she look the same,” he said. “Does Mythal look the same?”

“Yes,” said Solas. “And she is all right. That, I promise you. But she has no magic. She used a great deal to resurrect herself, and whatever was left, she gave it to me.”

Abelas did not seem surprised by this. All of them—save for Lea, who had regrown her power from the elemental certainties of the earth—seemed to have lost something in the space of time and Uthenera. The power was just less here. He lit a joint and smoked. He slid one across the table, for Solas, who did the same.

“So you will repair the Veil,” said Abelas, the joint pressed between his lips. He seemed very serious about this, nervous. Abelas had once been afraid of all the noise and the wanton, brute edges of this world, but now that he’d met El, he’d grown to need it. It was small but it was everything that he had, everything that he owned. Things had been taken from him that he did not wish to lose again. Farms and loved ones. Farms and loved ones. “Solas.”

“I will repair the Veil,” said Solas, releasing the smoke from his lungs. “In some ways, I've already started. I decided that long ago, Abelas.”

“How long will that sort of work take you.”

“By my calculations," said Solas, “I believe it will take one year, give or take. Sene and I—we will have to travel some. But I hope to be finished before the wedding.”

“It sounds like you have given this decision a great deal of thought.”

“I have,” said Solas, squaring up with him, though he hesitated, looking down at the joint between his fingers. He could taste the bitter elfroot in his lungs, the sweet simplicity. “Through no small sacrifice. I have never been so sure of anything.”

“How have you dealt with it?” said Abelas. “Mythal—she and Sene must have met. That is a mindfuck, Solas. Even for you.”

“That’s exactly what it is,” said Solas. “Perhaps more literally than you realize. They have met. One might wager they’ve assembled some sort of friendship, but I think that’s optimistic. They tolerate each other. It’s not about me. It’s a personality thing. Mythal is…cryptic and difficult. Sene is very straightforward in how she handles nearly everything in her life. But they have worked together, even fought side by side. They are practical, each of them in their way.”

“Mythal is jealous.”

“Yes,” said Solas, taking a very deep breath. “She is.”

“That is expected.”

“She was always a little like that. Drama, you know.”

“Yes, I do.”

“I’m useless to tell, in any case. She died, and her mind—it recycled itself. Over and over. The same thoughts, the same feelings. It became twisted. When she came back, she was the same woman she was the day she died, but millennia had chewed her subconscious to pieces in the Fade, and I am not the same man. She did not have time to heal the way that we did, Abelas, and so she struggles now to do it all at once. Rest is restorative. Death is a finality.”

“Does she understand that?”

“I think she understands. But even when we were together, she feared I’d leave her, or that she did not deserve me. Somehow. I don’t know how to answer the prayer in her heart, and I never could. I just hope that she—” He closed his eyes, finding that his head hurt all of a sudden. “I apologize.”

“Go on,” said Abelas. “Please, Solas. Go on.”

Solas sighed, inward. Like sucking the air back into his head and feeling it float away into the sky, a balloon. The tent was smoky and warm. “I would just like for her to be _her._ Does that make sense?”

“Yes.”

“Just her, to do what she wants, for once. Mythal never got to live life on her own terms, not even when she was a child. After my mother died, she was devastated. She sacrificed everything for me, the rebellion. Her empire, her reputation, her life.”

“I know all of this, Solas.”

“I know you do,” said Solas. “But nothing is worth that sort of life. I can’t make her see it. She must find the way on her own.”

“That is honorable,” said Abelas. “Solas, I’m sure she knows. Especially if she is with Lea. Your mother was always wise, and kind. To me at least. Lea will help.”

“I very much hope so,” said Solas.

“It eats into your heart, to take her magic.”

“Yes,” said Solas. “It does.”

“But it was freely given,” said Abelas. “You did not even ask. She initiated the entire transaction. That must matter.”

“Yes. I have tried not to internalize it. A gift is a gift. It always was.”

“A gift is a gift,” said Abelas, like he remembered as well. “You are right.”

Together, they smoked and regarded the elephant. Abelas tapped a finger to the table, once, and a little pool of condensation appeared. The elephant went right to it and took a drink. It raised its trunk in affirmation.

Solas smiled. “You’ve gotten very good at that,” he said. “Seriously. I’ve never seen anything but the cranes, until now.”

“I’ve had a lot of time to practice,” said Abelas. He glanced up at Solas, an old trick lingering there between them. “El is very fond of these little magics. She sometimes just asks me to do them, for no reason, before we go to sleep in our tent at night. The day I met her clan, I made a whole flock of little cranes that swept through the farm. They clapped their hands and took to me in an instant.”

Abelas— _sorrow, mockingbird—_ he sounded so shocked by this, always surprising himself with these little successes in the world, even when the proof slept beside him each night. Meanwhile, Solas— _pride_ , _wisdom_ , whatever the fuck you want to call him—smirked quietly into his wine. A gift is a gift. Some things, he never did manage to overcomplicate.

 

They went for a stroll through the garden, pleasant and warm with the wine and the smoke. The fields were mostly empty, but there were night guards who patrolled the perimeter, and their torches seemed to float, as if held fast by ghosts. Solas and Abelas stumbled upon the girls by accident, halfway back to the barn. Sene and El had hopped up onto a low fence, sat with their legs dangling—Sene’s nearly touched the ground and she was so lanky in comparison to El the dairy elf. El was compact and efficient. Sene was long as day. They were so different, and yet, there they were. They were smoking, looking up at the clear night sky overhead, laughing and nonsensical.

“There they are,” said Abelas.

“We’ve been searching everywhere for you,” said Solas, smirking, as they approached. He had his hands in his pockets. “We walked one whole acre.”

Sene gave him a lazy look. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We were bored.”

“You’re high,” said Abelas, smiling, looking deep into his lover’s eyes. “Are you high?”

“I got the Inquisitor high,” said El, and then she started laughing. “Don’t tell anyone, Abelas. I got her _high_.”

Sene put her head on Solas’s shoulder, smiling. Her eyelids were like great big heavy quilts.

“Hi _,_ vhenan,” said Solas. “Pun intended.”

“Shh.”

 

Meanwhile, in the ancient landscape far, far away, it was a full moon as the nicest witch in all the Weathers and her friend the empress floated in a fishing boat, holding their fishing rods, their fishing lines in the water. The bait bobbed up and down on the turbulent sea.

“Night fishing,” said Lea. She wore a hat, even still, and she was crunching on a raw carrot. She had taught Mythal how to tie the fish hooks to the end of the line, and how to pick the right bait. “This is the best kind of fishing. All the weird, old bottom feeders come up when the moon is hot. They look for the big lake lightning bugs, and the idiot birds have all washed into their nests till dawn, so there’s no competition. It is a long-kept secret in the fishing world. Or, at least it was nine thousand years ago.” She laughed.

Mythal did not wear a hat that night. But she was very focused. The thing about Lea was, even when she was using magic, it didn’t feel like magic. It felt like natural order, moving along in a world where the rules are like ours, just slightly different. The moon was bigger. The water was darker. But there was still the moon, still the sea. The fish were enchanted and glowing beneath the surface, but they were still just fish. Mythal never knew which parts were her magic, and which were just nature at its most extreme. This was an old place that had gone untouched for thousands of years. Even Tevinter—they didn’t come near it. Except for one of course, but he was special. There was too much magic in the bones of the earth, the kind that did not welcome strangers who were not welcome already. The kind that only Lea understood.

“These glowing fish give me nightmares,” said Mythal after a little while. She sipped from her champagne cocktail. They drank them quite often.

Lea waved her off. “Nightmares are all in your head, witch.”

“You say that,” she said. “But you know the truth.”

“Your drama makes life interesting. In small doses. Remember.”

Mythal blushed.

Something bit on the end of Lea’s line then. She pulled back, braced, reeled it in hard as Mythal set aside her rod and leaned over the edge of the boat to try and spot the taker.

“I half-expect an old boot,” she said.

“I do as well,” said Lea. “Whose boot, do you think? A farmer, or a Sentinel?”

“Many men were both.”

“Truer words, my darling. Perhaps it is the boot of a Farmer-Sentinel. Like sweet Sorrow.”

“Perhaps,” said Mythal.

Once she got her catch into the boat, it was not an old boot. It was a crustacean, with glowing pink eyes and pincers as big as egg plants. It stared at them, and it wiggled and fussed like an infant. It seemed to be half fish, with its tail fin flopping about in the boat. It was creepy, and it smelled of the worst, grossest parts of the sea.

“I’m not eating that,” said Mythal.

Lea studied it closely, pressed a finger to the top of its little brain so that it fell into a weird kind of animal calm. “This is not a thing to eat,” said Lea. “I agree.” She picked it up by the fin and tossed it back. She dried her hands on her dress. “I’m not hungry anyway.”

“What do you think Solas is doing right now?” said Mythal, dreamy. She was staring up at the Backwater stars. Her eyes were wide open, clear and dark as the old world had used to be.

“He is with Abelas,” said Lea, her eyes closed. Knowing, going down to the well of knowledge and asking the earth for its invitation. She did not do this often. Only when the occasion demanded.

“He is?”

“In a farm field somewhere. They are sharing their drugs among the fireflies. They are happy.”

Mythal felt her throat close into itself, and she thought she might cry from joy and a pure swelling of emotion, but she held it back. Drama, Lea said, keeps life interesting. In _small_ doses. Feelings mustn't always be a storm. “Do you you know that for certain?” she said.

"I do,” said Lea.

Every last word she spoke, it was like she could see the future. Or perhaps she made it so. Who was this witch, and what was her place here? She just married the earth, didn’t she. The widow who married the earth. She just married the earth, and like any good ancient lover, it gave her all of its ancient secrets. _I do. I do. I do._


	61. Book of Myths

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Looking back.

_Meet_

The sun licked off the snow, bright and paralyzing. The whole thing felt like some sort of weird reunion, only nobody knew each other. Can you reunite with a bunch of people you’ve never met? Maybe. Living is hard.

“My name is Solas,” he said, serious, very still, hands in his pockets as he watched her, “if there are to be introductions. I am pleased to see you still live.”

Sene glanced around. She looked at her hand. Scribbly, green thing of death. What the fuck. She looked at the man named Solas. He was stern and mean and big like an anvil. Too tall for an elf. But so was she. And so was practically everyone she knew, and this was confusing. So she turned around, and she left. Very quickly. Goodbye, Sene.

Cassandra swore under her breath.

“There goes the redhead,” said Varric, laughing as he reloaded Bianca. “You ever chased away a girl that fast before, Chuckles? Or is this a first for you.”

“You’d be surprised,” said Solas.

“The two of you sit here and joke,” said Cassandra. “I’m going after her.”

Solas took his hands out of his pockets. He straightened his gloves, then he put them back in again. “Let me,” he said.

“ _You_?” said Cassandra.

“She’s Dalish,” he said, “and obviously quite young. At the very least, I am another elf. She’ll trust me.”

Varric stowed his crossbow, spat into the weeds. “The man’s got a point, seeker.”

Solas smiled.

Cassandra rolled her eyes. “Fine,” she said. “But you’d better not fail, apostate. I mean it. We need her.”

“I do not _fail_ , seeker,” said Solas. “I’ll be back.”

He found her not far, sitting by the edge of the river, her hand stuck deep in a snow bank. The picture was funny. She was very tall. This was the first thing he noticed about her. Her height, and her hair.

“Trying to freeze it off?” he said.

She glared. She could make a mean face if she needed to. She took her hand out of the snow, shook it hard, winced.

He looked around, stretched out. Then he sat down beside her. “Come back,” he said, squinting into the sun. “Sene.”

“No,” she said.

“What will you do instead?” he said. “Go back to your clan? The sky is falling, lethal’lan, and it seems that your magical hand is the key to our salvation.”

She glanced at him. He smirked.

“Who are you?” she said.

“I am nobody. Who are you?”

“Nobody.”

“Then we have that in common.”

She sighed. She held out her hand between them, flexed her fingers, giving in. She was a little green all of a sudden, not from the anchor, but like she might throw up. “It’s vibrating,” she said. “It won’t stop.”

He became serious. He gave her a look. “Can I?”

“Yes,” she said.

He straightened up in the snow, boots crunching, took her hand into his. She sort of shivered.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“Nothing,” she said, smiling all of a sudden. So fast. The green in her cheeks had turned to red. “I just—I felt something.”

“Felt what?”

She stared at him. She was pretty. The red hair was coming loose at her temples and it was sort of like a gut punch. He wanted to kiss her right then. It fucked him up. He shook out his head like some sort of animal.

She laughed.

“What is so funny?” he said. He was still holding her hand.

“You,” she said.

He’d been right, of course. She trusted him.

 

_Kin_

Sene had always been scribbly. She woke up in a weird hut somewhere in the middle of the weird mountains. _What the fuck?_ She was not sure whether she’d said it out loud or just inside her own curly, scribbly head. She looked around.

There was a spindly elf in the room there with her, refilling a pitcher of water by the stove. She was dressed in trim, ragtag clothing. She must have been fourteen years old. Maybe fifteen? She had huge eyes.

When she saw Sene, she dropped the pitcher. It was made of tin or something. It clanged hard to the floor. “Oh,” she said. “You—I didn’t know you’d be awake, I swear.”

“Where am I?” said Sene.

The elf dropped to her knees on the red carpet. A disturbing display. “I beg your forgiveness,” she said, shivering, “and your blessing. I am but a humble servant.”

“But a humble what?” said Sene. She flung her legs over the side of the bed, put her bare feet on the floor. She was annoyed. Not by the elf, just in general. “Please don’t do that.”

“You are back in Haven, my lady,” said the elf, still pressing her forehead to the floor. “They say you saved us.”

“Who says?” said Sene. She got down on one knee, dragged the tiny elf to her feet. Sene was tall and strong. The elf cowered, backed away. “Don’t do that. It’s okay. I’m just an elf, like you.”

“But the Breach stopped growing,” said the elf, holding her hands over her face.

Sene thought she must be emitting a bright light or something, but when she checked, she was still pretty dull. She was just Sene. “The Breach?”

“Yes,” said the elf, “just like the mark on your hand.”

“Mark?” She got light-headed. She remembered. Sick, gross demons. Magic everywhere. Also, people asking her to do things. The room stopped spinning. She looked down at her hand. She sighed and gritted her teeth. It was real. “Fuck,” she said.

“It’s all anyone has talked about for the past three days,” said the elf.

“Three days?” Sene looked at her. She could feel her own hair, sticking and gross. It was knotted into the same braid she’d stuck it in the morning before the Conclave. The fucking Conclave. She could have killed Deshanna. “It’s been three days?”

But then, her hand—it crackled. It turned green? This scared the shit out of her. She closed it into a fist and clutched it to her chest, and she remembered something else.

“What is your name?” she said to the servant elf.

“Willow,” said the elf, “my lady.” She lowered her chin, refused to look Sene in the eye.

“Willow,” said Sene. “Good. Willow. Can you tell me—where is—? He’s a big elf, the man I need. Tall. He knows about this stuff, about the rifts. He’s really bald, with weird magic. Kind of—”

“Cute?” said Willow, she looked up, hesitant, pink in her freckled cheeks. “Kind of cute?”

“Yes,” said Sene, smiling, but feeling the magic in her wrist, hot and unsteady and making her sweat. “Very cute. Where is he?”

“He sleeps in a hut next to the apothecary, my lady. His name is Solas.”

“Right,” said Sene. “Solas. That was his name.”

“I can take you to him,” said Willow.

“That would be good,” said Sene. But she was so dizzy. She stumbled a little. Willow caught her, but she nearly crumbled beneath Sene’s weight and had to steady herself against a heavy wooden bookshelf. The thing jangled and something fell to the floor and shattered into a million pieces.

“Shit,” said Willow.

“It’s okay,” said Sene. “Don’t worry about it.”

“You know he watched you while you slept,” said Willow, holding Sene firmly around the waist.

“Who did?” said Sene. She shoved her left hand into her pocket. Out of sight, out of mind?

“Solas.”

“Solas?”

“Yes, the cute one.”

“Oh, right. Duh,” said Sene. She looked around at all the lanterns. It was day. She could tell even though the shutters were closed on the windows. She thought she’d need a jacket before going outside. But then, she became suddenly self-conscious. She blushed. She looked down at Willow the serving elf. “Wait. He _watched_ me?”

Willow nodded. “He put a cold rag on your forehead.”

Sene touched her own forehead. She was both embarrassed but also kind of shivery. A cute man had watched her in her sleep and put a cold rag on her forehead. She shook out her head, felt her hair snag on Willow’s earring. “Oh, fuck,” said Sene. “I’m so sorry. My hair is a shit show right now.”

“It’s all right,” said Willow, tugging the hair free with nimble fingers. She then tucked the piece of hair back into Sene’s braid, just like that. When she did this, Sene was overcome with emotion. She had never been so thankful for anyone or anything in her entire life. She pulled the little elf in and hugged her furiously.

“Thank you,” she said, close to tears. Fuck. “Thank you, Willow.”

Willow was taken aback. She was just a servant. But the Herald of Andraste was here now, and she was warm and big and safe-feeling. Gracious. She seemed to radiate heat from her very core, but she still just smelled like sweat, and lemons. The little elf named Willow knew it then, the truth—that the world was good again if Sene was in it. They would be saved.

 

_Surfaces_

“Sene,” said Dorian.

Her boots were heavy, sopping in the glowing, red future of Redcliffe Castle. She was soaked to the waist, picking chunks of gravel out of her hair. This was total and utter shit. Everything lost, floating around in hushed whispers. Things and magic she’d never understand. “What, Dorian?”

“You’ll want to see this,” he said. He was soaking wet, too. He’d lost some fabric off his armor and was up ahead, in the hallway of a cramped cell block. His hair was rumpled, and he was disheveled, and he looked exhausted.

“Did you find something?”

“Indeed, I have,” he said.

The last cell on the left, sitting on the floor. At first, she couldn't tell what she was was looking at, but then she saw: It was a man. It was Solas. Elbows resting on his knees, his head tilted back against the stone wall. It was a familiar posture, as he was dreaming. This was something she’d seen him do a thousand times it seemed, but everything was so dark here. Sene dropped to her knees beside him, on the other side of the bars. “I don't understand,” she said, a whisper. He didn’t budge.

“That is your sad, elf boyfriend,” said Dorian. “Is it not?”

“We’re just friends,” said Sene, hurried.

“Could have fooled me.”

“Shut the fuck up, Dorian.”

He rolled his eyes.

She reached through the bars then, shook Solas by the shoulders. “Solas,” she said. “ _Solas_. Wake up. It’s me. It’s Sene. Please wake up.”

It took him a moment. He was groggy, and his head seemed to float and slump on his shoulders like he was half-dead. But finally he surfaced, and his eyes lulled toward her. “Sene?” he said, his cold, red eyes. He seemed to lose his breath when he saw her.

“Are you okay?”

He blinked, rapidly. “Are you real?”

She tried to smile as she nodded, but he looked so weak. She started to cry. Still, the relief was like a whip inside her chest. “Your eyes,” she said. She reached for him, but he flinched. He did not want her to touch him, to see. “What happened to you?”

“How did you find me here?” he said. “What happened to _you_ , Sene?”

Sene had no idea what to say. She looked up at Dorian, wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “I don’t know.”

Dorian sighed. “Solas,” he said. “The spell Alexius cast displaced us in time,” he said, quietly. “We just got here. So to speak.”

“Time travel?” said Solas. “You’re serious?”

“As your fatal condition, yes,” said Dorian. “Unfortunately for you, dear apostate.”

Solas lurched forward, took hold of the bars. It was loud, and fast, and violent, and this startled Sene. She fell backward, watched him struggle against the restraint of the cell, his terrible sickness, whatever it was. “A wormhole," he said to Dorian. "You know how to reverse the process. Do you not?”

“Presumably,” said Dorian.

“I dreamed this,” said Solas, looking at Sene now. He shook his head, frantic. There was something wrong with his voice, but he was still Solas. She was crying again, and this seemed to break his heart, soften him so that he reached out to her. “I dreamed it. Do not fear me, lethal’lan.”

“This is so fucked up,” she said. “I don’t know what the fuck is going on. What am I’m doing, Solas. Are you gonna die?”

He inhaled, exhaled, heavy and shaken. He slid his hands through the bars, put them on top of hers, and he held them hard. “It is so good to see you,” he said. “You cannot imagine.”

She sniffled. “You, too.”

“Look at me.”

She did. It was scary.

“Breathe, Sene,” he said, breathing in through his nose, out through his mouth. “Breathe.”

She closed her eyes. She pictured Haven. Rooftops, tabletops. Surfaces. All kinds of surfaces. That is where she and Solas spent their time—as friends. Legs dangling off the floor and looking up at the wide open sky. Doing stupid things. Trading secrets. “I’m okay,” she said, eyes open. “I think. Now.”

He smiled, and he almost laughed. It was so painful to see him smile when he was so broken, so red. “Very good,” he said.

“We have a key, you know,” said Dorian. He held it up in his hand. A jagged metal thing. “Your semi-jailed reunion, quaint as it may be, is terribly depressing.”

“I see you haven’t changed,” said Solas, looking up at Dorian. The faintest hint of a smirk. “Tevinter.”

“No, I have not,” said Dorian. “Unlike you. You look terrible. May we leave?”

Sene looked back at Solas, very eager. Very red. “Yes, please,” she said. “Let’s go.”

 

_Wrists_

About a week later, Witchwood was fanatical. Ice everywhere, the shrapnel freezing at deadly speeds. Some fast rebel mage had got too close to Solas, snapped his staff clean in two. Solas put him into the dirt with his bare hands. He was out of his mind. Old habits die hard.

The moment the fight was over, he got to his feet and found Sene from across the weird blue of the canyon. Red hair. A whip, tall and uncut against the breeze. He couldn’t focus. But she was okay and everybody was okay and, for the moment, the entire world seemed to be absolved of violence and grasping, and so he picked up his shit, and he left.

Sene found Dorian helping Bull with a fucked up shoulder over by the cave.

“It’s just a sprain,” said Dorian. Gentle, focused. “Hold still, won’t you please?”

Bull told Sene to go find Solas. “Meet us back here when you can.”

She said okay.

She tracked Solas to the lake. He was tense, pissed off. She knew he did not like finishing his enemies like that. It left a bad taste. Sometimes, it took him hours to shake it. He was dropped to a crouch with his head hanging between his knees. She knew better than to press him, but she needed to know he was okay.

The staff lay dead in the weeds. 

“I’m fine,” he said to her.

She nodded. She was very tired. Her stamina massacred from the fight. So she flung her bow off of her back and dropped to a sit against a nearby rock. She caught her breath, tugged her hair loose from its braids. It was huge and red and curly with sweat. She didn’t care. She didn’t think. She just plucked up the grass in handfuls and closed her eyes and waited.

At some point, he said her name.

She wasn’t sure if she’d fallen asleep, but he was still over there by the lake, sitting now with his elbows resting on his knees.

“Are you good?” she said.

“I’m good,” he said.

She picked up her bow and went to him. She sat down, unlaced her boots and took them off one by one and put her feet into the water. Old habits. It felt good. He smiled. It was relief more than anything.

After a moment, he held out his hands, closed them into fists, then he opened them back up again. A reflex. He always did this after a fight. Over and over, like he was searching for evidence that it had actually happened. That it was real. Sene studied his knuckles as she so often did. The right hand was a little messed up, but nothing serious. He leaned forward to dip it in the lake. He shook it out and winced. Then he turned to her, only a little. He held her hand, smoothed his thumb over her wrist.

“Should we go back?” she said.

“Not yet,” he said, like some great big revelation. Only it wasn’t. It was merely a natural progression, the ins and the outs of their early comfort together.

The water was gold. A molten pool. Somewhere nearby, a bunch of finches poured into the trees. A whole, great flock of them. They chirped. Despite everything, this was a pretty place.

He kissed her on the wrist, tender but true. It was a first for them. She was breathless after that, but her hands were not soft either as she put her head on his shoulder, and they stayed there just like that, for a long time.

 

_Memorial_

“Skyhold,” said Solas. It was freezing where they stood, far away from the rest of them. In the view of the valley below, deep in the trenches of the Frostbacks, there was a castle—crumbling, but alive.

Sene was tired. Some of the red hair had come loose from her braids, and she pushed it back of her face. The travel had been days, maybe a week. She could see her breath. Solas, beside her, was big, outfitted in heavy furs that went up around his neck, and he held his hands behind his back as he watched her. She was bruised and undone, her body aching, ready for the journey to be done.

“That's Skyhold?” said Sene. “That huge castle is Skyhold? We’re here?”

“Nearly,” said Solas.

“Solas,” said Sene. She huffed, and she flung her bow off her back and into the snow. She crouched down and shook her head in her heavy-gloved hands. “What the fuck?”

“Excuse me?”

“How long have you known this was here?”

“Always,” said Solas. “You are wondering why I did not say anything before.”

“A little,” said Sene, looking up at him. “Why didn’t you?”

Solas got down on his knees and sat beside her. He took off his gloves, studied their long, elegant seams and sighed. “The trek is not for the fainthearted,” he said. “I did not know that such a fortress would be required of our organization, lethal’lan. I didn’t know. I thought the gamut would be up by now.”

“Fuck,” said Sene. She rolled her head around on her shoulders, then she stared at him, right at him, hard. “I get it. Thank you,” she said.

“Do not thank me,” said Solas, looking out at the heavy bricks of some hellish memorial. He still half-saw the thing that had been before, the spire that rose into the clouds so as to feel like floating when they were in it. Mythal in her quiet nightgowns made of silk spun by royal insects, such a small woman. How she would move through the halls in her smallness, and yet her bigness, and sing songs from her privileged childhood in her mediocre voice that addicted him, show him her wrists and her insides where he would move freely in and out, and kiss the nape of her neck until she shivered. It was dark, smoky hallways with her, always. She lived now in the valleys of his memory as little more than a specter—a mad ghost in a bone tower in the Fade. And in time, she would not be there at all—just an imprint, her battered head as Abelas set her limp body on the satin bedsheets, dead, murdered, and Solas wretched until he lost his guts on the floor, and then he ripped up the tower where they’d slept by the roots, where she’d sung her stupid songs, and he watched it burn and shudder, helpless into the sky. He buried her in a field of greenery and wild winter daisies, hidden in the mountains somewhere far away. It snowed at the castle for two straight months when she was gone. He drank so much, he lost parts of his brain and pieces of his mind and his sight and whole layers of himself, and as he wrote the Veil  _down_ as a formula on the walls, all over the walls where the paintings had used to be, like a man possessed, all he thought was that he would not love again. And he did not love again, not until he lifted the mathematics into existence with his power from the stars, and he created the Veil, slept, and surfaced in the aftermath eight thousand years later, and a pretty girl with red hair would suck a piece of his magic into her bones and tell him he was funny. _You’re funny,_ she would say. Just like that. _What is so funny?_ he would say. _You,_ she would say. And then he would love her, like a sickness—that which one day, would become a cure.

_Skyhold_

Solas had a habit of testing each color on the insides of his wrists. He’d mix the paint in tiny, ceramic bowls, and then he’d take the smallest brush and make a smudge, just there, at the base of his palm, or on his forearm, and he’d wait.

That day, it was blue. A pale, smoky blue. He stood back to measure its depth against the light of the room and then put his hands on his hips, surveying the full, empty breadth of the rotunda. Taking it all in, huge gulps. He rolled up both of his sleeves, and he got down to a crouch, and he began.

Sene was nervous. Skyhold was new, a big place. She didn’t know he could paint. Probably it wasn’t fair. A man should not be so singularly talented in so many ways. She remembered this time they were walking past the barracks outside of Haven, and he tripped over a root that had been hidden in the snow. She’d never seen him trip over anything before. In fact, he so rarely made mistakes of any kind. It made her laugh.

“What is so funny?” he said, looking back at her with his hands shoved in his pockets.

“You tripped,” she said. “You never trip.”

It was a novelty.

But this, now, watching him paint, this was not funny. It felt serious. She’d come to the rotunda because she was bored, and unsure, and  because Cole was acting strange in the garden again. Spirit child. She still didn’t understand. Solas was wearing a pale gray shirt, the fabric as thin as tissue. He was low to the ground, sketching something into the wall with what appeared to be a pencil, but it was not a pencil. The noise that it made was more like scraping. She was worried about going all the way inside the room, because she knew he would sense her, and she did not want to disturb him.

Overhead, however, Dorian was leaning forward with his hands on the rail, smirking in her direction. He held out his hand and dropped something on purpose, a metal key perhaps. It fell to the concrete floor with a clang.

“Silly me,” said Dorian.

Solas did not even flinch, was buffing something out of the stone with his thumb. “Something you need, Tevinter?”

“Certainly not,” called Dorian. “Though, perhaps the Inquisitor feels differently. You should turn around and ask her yourself.”

With this, Solas paused, glanced over his shoulder. “Sene.” He smiled.

She straightened up, hands behind her back. “Hi.”

Dorian sighed from overhead, his chin resting in his hands. Just two tall elves staring at each other in the unpainted rotunda. There was an art to all of this, he thought. Somewhere. Such brute, kind simplicities.

 

_Fade_

It was hard staying awake. The rotunda had a purple light, and it all felt like dreaming. It had been a while since Solas had kissed her wrist in the Hinterlands. They were still with each other, constantly it seemed, but he had drawn inward. He was not pulling away, just inward, like a man at the bottom of a deep, blue sea, and it was tying Sene into knots, because she really liked him. She really did.

All the world had become their friendship in those days. Like sinking into the cushions. She would go to his rotunda, and she would read as he painted. They would talk about whatever. He was full of wonder. He told stories. Endless stories from the Fade. He would charm her, both of them like animals. He did card tricks, and once, he fashioned a flower from behind her ear. This had been last week, and it was just another clue. The flower was purple, a purple daisy. She had never seen one like that before. He smelled very good, and he was very strong. Tall, balanced. He treated her like an equal, and this was the most important thing of them all. She thought about that day when he kissed her on the wrist and how it had made her hungry. She wanted to swallow the whole world, and him in it. She had never felt this way before, ever, and she had begun to realize that if she wanted something more to happen between them, then at some point, she was going to have to do it herself. Make it happen. Let him know. He seemed so worried about something, something deep inside and he was distant and stoic in moments where it seemed like he might have wanted to kiss her. But he did like her. She didn't know a whole lot about guys, but she knew this much. It was obvious, wasn't it? Wasn't it?

That night, she fell asleep, on their couch in the rotunda. She’d put her head on his shoulder as he was talking. He was holding her hand. The anchor. That had been their excuse for a while. But not really anymore. Now, it was just hands. His hands were rough, like canvas stretched and scraped.

When she opened her eyes, she was somewhere else. She was in Haven. The sky was cold and like a long, gray bar. Everything was quiet, but there was a party somewhere in the distance. Like the tavern was full. She couldn’t tell. She was standing with her boots in the snow, crunching, and she looked around.

“Solas?” she said.

“I’m right here,” he said. There he was, right there. The tallest man she’d ever loved. The only man. She smiled at him, and he took her hand. “Come with me, vhenan.”

They walked for a little while, old familiar snow banks and all the little houses and tents intact. This was Haven, but it was before. Nothing had gone to shit yet. The world wasn’t ending. The Breach was just a sucking pit in the sky, and she wanted to go backward and forward, all at once. She missed the old days, when she did not have to be so in charge. Now, it was like a mean tooth, rotting in the back of her gums. She couldn’t shake it. Always there, aching. But then, she remembered. He was holding her hand. Her _right_ hand. This was not an anchor thing. It was a _them_ thing. He walked with his head high and his chin up, looking straight out ahead like nothing was in their way. They were headed for the apothecary. It started to snow.

He stopped them, beside an old fire pit. It looked like it hadn’t burned in weeks. The whole place felt unsettled, but still—the music. It was somewhere. She looked back, but she couldn’t see a party. By now, she had figured that they were in the Fade, but she didn’t know for sure. She was waiting for him, for his confirmation.

“Sene,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Do you know where we are?”

“Yes.”

“The Fade is a malleable place,” he said, looking around. Like he was home. “It is filled with reflections and memories. You don’t have to be afraid. We can leave at any time.”

“I’m not afraid,” she said.

He smiled. “Good.”

They sat down, leaning with their backs against the apothecary’s old house. It all smelled like thyme for some reason, and roses. From where they were sitting, they could see the Breach and all of its unfucked glory. Hovering up there. A mean entity. Solas was still holding her hand.

“Do you hear a party somewhere?” said Sene, looking around.

“Sort of,” he said. “I may just be hearing what you’re hearing.”

“So like,” said Sene, studying their hands together, their fingers interlaced, “are our bodies still just asleep on the couch? Are we just asleep?”

“That is the general idea, yes,” said Solas. “This is a dream, for all intents and purposes. A memory.”

“Why Haven?” she said.

“Because it is real,” he said. “It will always be important to you.”

“And you?” she said.

He sighed. Like a great big man of high importance. They were both sitting with their knees up. Two elves, too tall. He let go of her hand then and, instead, held onto her knee. It was fast, casual, right. His hands were big. She tucked her hands into her lap and put her head on his shoulder.

“When I think of Haven,” he said, “I think of rooftops.”

“Me, too,” she said.

“It is sad that we cannot go back,” he said, and he got lost. He was staring at the Breach, like a great eye.

“Solas,” she said.

“Yes, vhenan.”

Vhenan.

“Why did you bring me here?” she said.

“Because you fell asleep,” he said.

“So?”

“I wasn’t ready,” he said. “For the night to be over. Not yet.”

“You missed me?” she said. She set her chin on his shoulder.

He put his head back, against the high wooden wall. He peaked at her out of one eye, and he relented. “Yes.”

“I think of Haven as the beginning,” she said.

“The beginning of what?” he said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Us? The Inquisition? My entire life?”

He smirked. “You’re funny.”

“I am not,” she said.

“I didn’t mean for this,” he said.

“Mean for what?” she said.

“You,” he said. “Missing you. I’m sorry, Sene.”

“Sorry for what?”

He turned his head then, to look at her, like he couldn’t remember what he was going to say next. The snow, it was just an atmosphere, she noticed. It was neither cold nor wet. All the sounds from before, from the mystery party nearby, they had gone. It was only them now, and the wind.

She shifted toward him, dropped her knees so that she could see him better. His hand remained. Something held it there. “I thought I knew,” he said.

“Solas,” she said.

“What.”

“Can I kiss you?”

He seemed wholly surprised, and yet, relieved. Like the end of something. His eyes searched hers, but there was only earnestness, friendship, love.

“Yes,” he said.

She set her palm on his cheek, touched his ear. His hand still on her knee, she leaned forward, and she closed her eyes, and she touched her lips to his. Cold in the Fade air, then warm. Soft. They kissed. It was everything.

When they parted, they just looked at each other, and they smiled. It was like they knew. There was a whole lot of shit coming for them. Ten thousand trials and the end of the world. But in that moment, for just a second—they knew. Both of them. Outloud in the world. It was snowing in the Fade, and they were already in love, and they knew. All it took was a kiss, that red pebble on his tongue, the taste of apples and earth and Sene.

 

_Sex_

The bedsheets seemed extra fuzzy that night. They were new, just like Sene and Solas. Somebody had changed them without Sene asking. In the beginning, she liked smelling him on her at all times. She rarely changed her bedsheets, because she liked that his smell, whatever it was, it seemed to take over everything. The room, the mattress. He smelled so good, she wanted it in her hair. She could have sipped it. Filled a basin with Solas and bathed in him all day long and in some ways she had already done this and always would. Sometimes, in these early months of their love, they would have sex and she would purposely avoid the bath, just so she could be sure it was sinking into her soul. She liked the idea of riding to some faraway land of fuck-ups and war still smelling like Solas, and in secret, some part of him floating around inside of her. Nobody knew but them.

That night, they sipped wine in the fuzzy bedsheets. Solas was a little pensive, aloof, and she wanted to ask him what was wrong, but that seemed somehow nosy. She probably would have asked him if this were still Haven, and if they had not yet kissed or made love, but things were different now. It was not bad, just new. Like seeing this whole new side of him, and of them, and of all the things they used to do, and how they still mostly did the same things—like talking and walking and holding hands—only now it was all colored by their sex.

“When did it get so humid?” said Sene. Her hair was plumping up, frizz at the temples. They were not naked yet.

Solas sat, leaning against the headboard, glass in hand. “It is late summer, vhenan,” he said. “Even in the mountains.”

“Well, I don’t feel like it.”

“You don’t feel like late summer?”

“Not really,” she said. She sighed.

“Is something wrong?” he said.

“No,” she said. “Is something wrong with you.”

He gave her a look, swallowed the last of his wine, set the glass on the bedside table. “Not at all,” he said. “But I can tell that you think that there is something wrong, with me, you just don’t want to ask.”

She collapsed onto her back. “You’re all quiet,” she said.

He smiled. “I’m sorry, Sene,” he said. “I’ve just been a little preoccupied. The seasons changing, it is doing a number on me, I believe.”

“What kind of number?”

He slid into the sheets, beside her, looked her hard in the eye. He put the hair behind her ear. “Do not worry it,” he said. “Everything is fine.”

She kissed the very tip of his nose. He smoothed his rough hand up the long dip of her waist.

“Show me something,” she whispered.

He snapped his fingers once without question, and this put a butterfly into the air. A little purple one, very small. It got lost in the red nest of her hair. “Does that satisfy you, _avise’ain_?”

She shook her head, slowly. “Nope.”

He smirked.

She shifted closer to him, becoming earnest. “We don’t have to,” she said. “If you’re tired. If the changing seasons are doing a number.”

But he kissed her then, put both hands into her hair in familiar fashion. He smoothed it off her face. Then, he pulled, gently at first. She showed her neck to him.

“I am not tired,” he said.

She tugged him out of his shirt. He tugged her out of hers. He smelled so good, again. There was this spot, behind his ear, the skin just above his neck. You know the spot. It’s everything.

He was on top of her now, moving between her legs, smiling with his mouth on hers.

“What are these sheets, vhenan?” he said, breath hot in her ear. “They’re new.”

She was a little far gone. She put her hand down the front of his pants and held him in tight strokes. He grunted a little, his voice like gravel. They kissed. She just wanted him to love her, to tell her things. To share. She didn’t know how to ask, not yet. It would take many months before she figured out what was going on beneath the surface of Solas. For now, he was a tall, handsome man, and he was charming as fuck, and this did a lot of work. Some part of her sort of knew it could not go on forever. Maybe that was the hidden wisdom of Sene. Her dire practicality, taking over even as she felt him working his way inside of her, slowly, bit by bit.

She lost her breath. She went into her own thoughts, lost her place, too. “Did I just say something?” she breathed.

He said, “No.” He thrust. Deep. When he did this, there was solitude. For both of them, just a second. Then, he began. He had one hand in her hair, pulling just enough to make her want it more. The other hand he used to hang onto the side of the mattress, holding them firm to its surface.

“How did this start?” she said. It could happen so quickly, she thought. They would be talking, it would be whatever. Then, a moment would go by, and he would be inside her. His smell again, in her hair, in her sheets. She was so happy.

“How did what start, vhenan?”

“This,” she said. “You, me.” She lost it, squeaked as he fucked her.

“Humidity,” said Solas, lips on hers. A half-smile. She became little more than a puddle beneath him.

Her hair was going to keep growing until it consumed them both.

 

_Men_

“Okay. I got one,” said Bull. He took a great big drink from his great big flask.

“Shoot,” said Varric.

“Okay,” said Bull. He cleared his throat. He leaned forward against the table. He was excited. “An elf, a dwarf, and a qunari walk into a bar. The dwarf says—”

Varric sighed, dramatically.

“What the hell?” said Bull.

“Nothing,” said Varric.

Solas picked up the bottle, refilled their glasses. “What happens next?”

But Bull knew how to read a crowd. He huffed. “You know, we’re not all fucking wizards with words,” said Bull, glancing from Varric to Solas. “Or…wizards. I’m doing my best.”

“Of course you are,” said Solas. “Finish your joke. Please.”

But now, he was pouting. So Varric proposed a toast. “To Tiny,” he said. They all touched glasses and drank. Bull blushed into his whiskey.

This was a country tavern outside of Kirkwall. It was called the Dandelion. They were on a mission here with Sene to check things out at the Black Emporium. Some reports had come in a few weeks before, claiming that the shop had been magically “sealed” out of some sort of protest, and now, they were here, and while the three men drank, Sene had to be in a booth on the other side of the bar, sitting uncomfortably across from a tiny, chipper human woman named Jade. Jade drank only chartreuse, straight up, and she ran the books for the Black Emporium, and she had some very specific demands for the Inquisition, per the request of one Xenon the Antiquarian:

 _We would like to acquire six nugs from your breeder, the Lady Nightingale,_ she’d said straight away, among a great deal of other things, while adjusting her glasses. Sene face-palmed. The list of demands was six and a half pages long. It was around this time that the men had splintered off to order drinks and wait while Sene handled the issue on her own.

“How does she do this shit all day?” said Bull after a little while. He’d lost track of his joke after the toast. He’d pulled a coin from his pocket instead, was flattening it to the table with his thumb.

“Do what shit?” said Solas.

“This,” he said. “Entertaining these…requests.”

“The Black Emporium is a valuable resource,” said Varric. “I doubt Sene gives a shit, but Josephine most certainly will. That’s why we’re here.”

“Well they could at least give us the night off,” said Bull. “We could head into the city. Find a real bar.”

“A night off in Kirkwall,” said Varric. “What a lovely picture of sin.”

Bull cleared his throat then. He drank. He caught Solas, glancing over at Sene for the thirty-fifth time that hour.

Solas was a protective man, thought Bull. He was kind of a psycho on the battlefield, but Bull knew there was some other crap going on between him and Sene. Something intimate. This wasn’t just comrade behavior. He didn’t know what it was for sure, but he was a strong reader of hearts and minds, and he thought maybe they’d been getting it on in secret for at least the past few weeks.

“Are you going to finish your joke?” said Solas, after a moment of rumination. “I’m on the edge of my seat.”

“What’s up with you and the boss?” said Bull, point blank.

Solas raised his eyebrows. He said nothing. He hid his face in his glass and took a long drink.

Varric had started laughing. He started laughing so hard, that he nearly tipped over in his seat. Bianca hit the floor with a loud clanking noise. Several barmaids were alarmed. One rushed to his aid.

“What’s so funny?” said Bull.

“Nothing,” said Varric, catching his  breath. He thanked the barmaid. “It’s just the question.”

“What’s wrong with the question?”

“It’s the best joke I’ve heard all night.”

Bull gave him a look. “How the fuck is my question a joke? It’s a serious fucking question.”

“Because, Tiny,” said Varric, dusting off Bianca. “Because. It’s just so damn obvious”

“Obvious?” said Bull. “I thought jokes were supposed to be tricky. Not literal.”

“Jokes can be all kinds of things, Tiny.”

“Hmm,” said Bull. He was intrigued. “All kinds of things.”

At this point, Solas had leaned back in his chair. He was aloof to their discussion, staring at Sene again. She was flustered. She had her head in her hands. Her great big red hair was spilling everywhere. Jade the bookkeeper, meanwhile, was a tiny, put-together woman in a black skirt suit. She adjusted her glasses and read from her list with an immaculate sense of confidence and purpose.

Solas felt his mind wandering then. Something scratching at the surface. He shook out his head. When he glanced back, both Bull and Varric were staring right at him. “Can I help you?” he said.

“Yeah,” said Bull.

“In what way?”

“I just want to know.”

“You want to know what?”

Bull became flustered. “What the hell is going on between you two?”

“What the hell is going on between _who two_?”

“You and the boss.”

“Me and the boss?”

“You and Sene.”

Solas smirked.

Varric was laughing again. Solas just sipped his whiskey while Bull waited for an answer. But he was overthinking. Across the bar, the Inquisitor had put her face down on the table. As Jade read from her list, Sene just nodded or shook her head at regular intervals, defeated, as if she were systematically approving and disapproving of each proposed demand, per Josie’s predesignated orders. She had finished her glass of pink bubble wine about a half hour back, but the bar maidens seemed too intimidated to interrupt the conversation and offer her more. It was an extraordinary quandary, thought Solas as he drank. The whole thing. Like a joke.

Varric laughed, and Solas smirked. Bull put his flask down on the table. There was no punchline. The bar maidens and patrons of all shapes and sizes passed everywhere and in between. The Dandelion was lively with merchants and farmers, a sort of backwater crowd. In hindsight, it was probably the fact that it reminded Solas of home, of the Weathers. That is what made him lose his head. These suburban places that are not quite rural, but they aren't city either. Everybody with their job, and so leisure was a luxury. The piano played, and the lanterns cast a yellow glow of innocence all over the bar. This was happy place, and there was no mystery here. Everyone was exactly who they said they were, and everything was exactly as it seemed. Solas was certain of this as he sat there with two brave men that he had come to count as his friends, watching the Inquisitor closely from the other side of the bar.

He was a changed man, even if he didn't know it.  That much was for sure. No take-backs.

 

_Ghosts_

“What the tits?” said Sera. “Solas, where’s Quiz?”

They were sitting around the campfire in the smack center of the universe. Sera, Cassandra, Solas. It was the Hissing Wastes. The world was black and full of long, weird noises in the distance. Shivering smoke, like a chill.

Solas was smirking. “Why do you ask, lethal’lan?”

“I’m wondering,” said Sera, “because it’s creepy out here. Like weird little bugs in my brain. One by one. Eating. Hate this place.” She scratched, frantic, at the back of her head. He was still smirking. “Have off, elven man.”

“Sene is out hunting,” he said. “That is what she does. But perhaps she’s been detained.”

“What?”

“Solas, for the love of Andraste,” said Cassandra. She ran a whetstone down the length of her blade, glanced up at him.

“Yes, Cassandra?”

“Oh, you know what it is. Quit your smirking.”

He laughed. “I apologize, Cassandra. I was merely thinking about ghosts. Ghosts make me smirk, among other things.”

“Ghosts?” said Sera. She looked around, but it was all dark. Their camp, a warm halo in the endless, sand-fucked sea. This was a scary place. “Where?”

Cassandra rolled her eyes. 

“I’m not sure,” continued Solas. “Everywhere? It is only a feeling. The Veil. It’s just a pale vibration tonight. Can’t you feel it? Almost as if anything could happen.”

“He’s baiting you,” said Cassandra. “Do us both a favor, Sera. Don’t bite.”

“You are so immune, Seeker?” said Solas. He picked up a stick, drew some shapes in the sand. “Quite impressive.”

“Do not find yourself impressed,” she said. “I’m not always so privy. But I know you well enough by now not to fall prey to your idle amusements, Solas.”

“You offend me,” he said, smiling.

“Blue with weird horns,” said Sera, hooking her hands under her feet, tilting back so she could look at the stars. “She was just supposed to be hunting one of those things, right? Just _one._ She should be back by now. What do you call them, anyway? Those things she went to hunt. Those things. Something ram or other. Rammy…things…”

“Rams?” said Solas.

“Right. Rams. Whatever. I don’t care what _you_ call them, elven man, but she’s been gone a long time, and I’m going to look for her.”

“Sene is Dalish,” said Solas.

“No shit,” said Sera.

“That means she is probably communing with the ghosts of her kill. It takes a while.”

Cassandra scoffed.

“With ghosts?” said Sera. “What are you on about?”

“It is an old Dalish ritual,” said Solas. “They are very spiritual, the Dalish.”

“Not Sene. Sene gets laughs on that stuff. Her clan is all…weird. They like humans. They’re rich.”

“They may be rich,” said Solas, “but they are still Dalish. They take great strides in preserving their culture—especially given their mantle in the community. The Lavellans are wonderful proponents of Dalish ritual, especially per the ritual of hunting. Sene was head huntress for her clan. She is very good at communing with ghosts.”

“What the fuck do you mean by communing, elven man?”

“Here,” said Solas. “I’ll show you.” He held out his hand.

“Get off—”

He snapped his fingers, once. A pale blue butterfly popped into the air. A flash. There it was, hovering, the same red color as Sene’s red hair.

Sera got to her feet, startled out of her mind. “Sweet fucking Andraste,” she said. “Elven fucking magical shite. I’m out of here.” And just like that, she was gone.

By now, Cassandra was laughing.

“You are cruel, apostate,” she said, whetstone to the blade.

Solas caught the butterfly on his knuckles, gently, studied its glimmer. “I do what I can,” he said.

Sera found Sene not far. She was huddled under one of the sand dunes, disembowling her kill by the light of a torch stuck into the sand. It was a ripe August Ram—a female, but sizable. The male would have been too big for her to drag in all by herself. It would have taken forever. Up to the elbows in gore, she looked at Sera in the glint off the moon, coming over the hilltop, and she smiled. “Here to help?” she said.

“Yick,” said Sera, plopping down beside her, studying the entrails. “No fucking way. But Solas said you’d be talking to ghosts. Glad to know he’s just talking out his high elven ass again. Making me skittish.”

Sene laughed. “You have to learn to deal with him a little better, Sera,” said Sene. “It’s how he operates. He’s just teasing you.”

“What is it with men on teasing, anyway? Blackwall does the same shite.”

“Yes, well. Blackwall and Solas are a certain kind of man.”

“And Dorian. And Bull. Apparently. You know this how?”

“I grew up with men like this,” said Sene. “You should meet my cousin Terys. Total assface.”

But Sera wasn’t listening. She was caught in a daydream. “Men and their teasing. Not spaghetti brains, though. Never seen him tease anything.”

Sene gave her a look. “Who the fuck is spaghetti brains?” She was nearly finished. She wiped her hands down on a heavy, gross rag.

“Cullen,” said Sera. “The Commander. Got eyes for you, and spaghetti for hair. He’d never tease.”

Sene sighed. “Cullen does not have eyes for me.”

“He did,” said Sera. “Before Solas.”

“Before Solas?” said Sene. “That was months ago.”

“Maybe to _you,_ ” said Sera. “But the two of you were a secret, forever. Bumping in the night like ghosts.” She shivered. “Bloody ghosts.”

Sene cleared her throat. She wiped the sweat off her brow and looked down at her handiwork. Sera helped her string up the ram by its hooves, and together, they headed back toward camp. “We’re heading back tomorrow,” said Sene. “I guess with the Venatori under control, that’s it.” She looked up at the stars. “I like this place, though,” she said. “It’s so wide open, and pretty. Like anything can happen.”

Sera laughed at the coincidence. Solas had said the same shit. “Where are we headed next?” she said.

“Some frozen place,” said Sene. “The Emprise du Lion.”

“More Tevinters?”

“No,” said Sene, hauling that ram by the ropes. They could see the fire in the distance. “Red lyrium.”

“Red what?”

“Let’s not worry about it,” said Sene, in her way. “We’ll figure it out when we get there.”

“Leave the planning to the Commander, is it?” said Sera. “And his big spaghetti brain?”

“Yep,” said Sene.

She was just the hand in this operation. There were brains, and there was magic. But she was the hand. Handing down justice, hunting their dinner, killing the bad guys. It was all she ever was, and it was all she ever wanted. When they returned to camp, Solas had made a whole crop of magical butterflies. It was a wondrous display.

“Hi, vhenan,” he said, smiling up from the campfire. Cassandra had tamed a butterfly to her palm. “How were your ghosts this evening?” He smirked at Sera.

Sera just rolled her eyes and huffed over to the fire and shoved him, once. Solas laughed. Sene blushed furiously. She felt gross, and covered in carnage. But this was a carnage she’d got used to long ago, and these people were her friends.

 

_Time Travel_

The Storm Coast in summer was like constant lightning. It could be both bright and wet, with the rock outcroppings sticking straight into the sea. You could get lost out there, wandering for hours until you found a weird, Dwarven entrance to a weird, Dwarven cave and became inundated by spiders. Sene hated those fucking giant spiders. They were like a nightmare come true—sometimes literally, of course—though in the Storm Coast, other than the spiders, there were not many nightmares. There were so few people who lived here, and the whole shtick was run by bandits with whom she had negotiated a truce, and so now the Inquisition presence was bringing in more Dalish—farming clans, like Sene’s. There were already several in the area, as they liked the solitude and the separation from the human environment, and how it was just a two day’s ride to the markets of Highever, and five to Lothering and the Hinterlands.

The Stormlands of Ferelden were fertile for farming. The Storm Coast was a part of that, of course, but it was also particularly volatile in the way of terrain. You had to have a special itch for the earth and a knack for making it listen closely, and the Lavellans were just one example of a Dalish farming tradition that went back centuries. The elves knew how to till the earth on steep hillsides, a rare skill that came from having to farm unfavorable land as societal cast-offs. So they had learned to sow fields in what, from a distance, appeared to be giant staircases of organized greenery, running up and down the hillsides. The Dalish farms of the Storm Coast were mostly corn and beans. It did not get cold enough for wheat. With the Hesserians leashed, more clans were on their way. The Inquisition was there now, overseeing the transition and building further relations with their new bandit allies. The Blades of Hesserian were religiously devout, and while their methods were less than savory at times, they were eager to join the Inquisition. And they liked Sene. Sera had taught their archers a thing or two about throwing knives. Solas and Bull had also helped them restore the foundation to their stables so that their horses could rest safe from the weather.

Sene and Solas had spent the evening shopping in a little market not far from the camp. It was nearly all Dalish—shopping and selling. The environment was hushed and severe, as these were not the more easy-going clans that Sene had been raised to appreciate. They were stark, and they traded with humans, but they did not typically trust humans. They looked upon Sene’s guards with suspicion, but they were grateful toward her and Solas and Sera and Bull. After purchasing a few small goods for their camp, a treat to themselves more than anything, they went back, and it was full night, and Sera and Bull stayed up drinking with the Hesserians while Sene and Solas retired to their quarters—the old chief’s room that the bandits had converted to something rather cozy. It was decorated with pine cones that had been scented with cinnamon. This, to Sene, was a revelation.

“We have to get some of these for Skyhold,” she said, holding a scented pine cone to her freckled nose. She was wearing nothing but Solas’s shirt. They’d just sexed, and their armors and weapons were still all strewn to the ground in a pile of leather and metal.

“I’m sure the Hesserians can give you their recipe,” said Solas, on his back in the long, wide cot that made for a passable bed. “Or just take them with you. You are the Inquisitor after all.”

“We’d need huge ones for Skyhold,” said Sene. “Really huge ones.”

Solas peeked at her out of one eye. “Really huge pine cones?”

She shrugged, placed the pine cone back into the wicker basket on the mantle where the fire burned deep. “Wny not?”

She went back to the bed, sat with her legs crossed and her hair a quiet mess around her shoulders. She went to braiding it as he watched her. They’d been at this thing for several months now, with Sene’s injury at the Emprise du Lion behind them, and Solas feeling his old life prying in like a trespasser. At first, it had been easy to forget, but his new life here had made everything so bright, bubbling to the surface, immediate, and this made his mind begin to peel around the edges. But if there was one thing that put it back together, it was her, and her mild decency, and how she could sit there and be so tall and so redheaded at once, and so warm and pretty and eager to love him. She was always so eager to love him. This was the part of her he still did not understand.

“I have a question,” she said after a little while. She’d put her hair into a neat braid over her shoulder and tied the end with a piece of twine.

“What is it, vhenan?” he said, smiling. “Would you like a magic show?”

“No,” she said.

She sounded a little serious, so he opened his eyes.

“What’s the matter?”

“My question is not about magic.”

“What is it?”

“Just about—us.” She shrugged, like she wasn’t sure. “I’m sorry.”

“What about us?” he said. “Do not apologize.”

“I’ve been thinking,” she said.

“What have you been thinking?”

“I don’t know.” She blushed. “I just—the way you are, with women. Elves especially. Like at the market today, and just in general. It’s like you know them really well. You always know what to say to girls. It makes me think.”

He smiled, catching on just a little. “Ask your question, vhenan.”

She shifted in the bedsheets. She was still sitting, and he was still on his back. “I know you’ve been with other women, before me,” she said.

He sighed. He exhaled huge, staring right at her. His jaw was taut—he could feel her wiggling into him. “That is true,” he said. “But it doesn’t mean anything, Sene. It doesn’t affect how I feel about you.”

“I know,” she went on, but did she know? She was picking at a callus in her palm. “It’s just—I can tell. You’re older than me, and I don’t care about that, Solas, or who they were or how many. None of that is important.”

“It’s okay if it feels important, Sene. We can talk about it.”

“No,” she said, looking down at her hands. “Or, maybe.”

“Are you going to ask your question?”

She looked up, crisp green eyes. “Have you ever been in love?” she said. “Before me? Like real love?”

This took him by surprise. He had not thought of that—hadn’t thought of it in a long time. He felt the years stripping off him, shredding like a weed. And the past was there, but it wasn’t. Like a specter, or a dream. “Yes,” he said. He nodded, quickly, certain. “I have.”

He thought it would hurt her, the revelation, but it didn’t. She was just Sene, and Solas’s past was still just an idea. She nodded as well, seeming to know this about him. “Who?” she said.

“Who?” he said.

“I don’t need details,” said Sene. She heaved a huge sigh. It was like she was seeking to understand some other part of him, the part that existed before her. It was not something she did very often. “Just like—how long ago?”

He sat up, put his hands in hers. The touch electrified. Outside, it had begun to rain, and the rain was whipping into the windows. They could hear the bandits and Sera and Bull outside, rushing to put out the fire and abandon ship to the storm. “A long time ago,” he said. “But it was not like this, vhenan.”

“What do you mean?”

“Easy,” he said. “It was not easy.”

She seemed confused. “I’m easy?” she said. “Is that bad?”

“No,” he said. “Vhenan, you’re not easy. We are.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s good,” he said, reassuring. “Being with you, that is easy. Not because it’s simple, but because I feel—I think I probably I wasn’t ready before, though the details are escaping me.” He shook out his head. He took a deep breath. “I was younger. Something was always coming. For me, and for her. For us, together.”

“Stuff is always coming for us, Solas. It probably always will be”

“Not like that,” he said, squeezing his eyes shut. “Trust me, Sene. This, the two of us, together in the world. Walking around at the market, buying plums and whiskey from Dalish farmers like it’s any other day. That’s what I mean by easy. I know our lives aren’t easy, on the grand scale, but being with you, in the day to day—that is easy. Can you see the difference?” He wound his other hand into her hair, playing with the red curls, studying them so closely. They had the power to consume him.

He could tell that she sensed him drifting, that he was pained, he could feel her worrying over this, over him. Perhaps a little too much, and we know this now, but at the time, it was a part of what drew him to her. Her concern, that she took care of him like that, that she wanted to, knew how. Nobody else had ever really been like that with Solas, nurturing without holding him on a pedestal. Nobody but his mother.

She smiled quiet, and she leaned forward to kiss the bridge of his nose. “I get it,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. And someday, you can tell me all about it, okay?” she said. “Whatever happened, when you're ready. But until then, I get it. I understand.”

“Good,” said Solas.

It was like she knew, all of a sudden. Like she had traveled back in time, and he supposed that per the science of his magic, this was possible. But was it? His head was so lost those days, he could have been living in a dream. But it was not a dream. The only thing he knew for sure was that she was real, and she was his, and he loved her.

 

_Threshold_

And then, one day, after all the running and the stupid and the highs and the lows, they would be safe again. In the purple light of dusk, wide awake, all of their fucked-up troubles behind them, and there would be friends and everybody that they knew and loved—a party, welcoming them into their new lives, but this one special, and he would fashion a flower from behind her ear, because that is what he did. That is to come. But first.

When Solas woke up, the morning after they sexed for the very first time, Sene was still asleep. He thought it was unusual. Sene usually woke up very early. He knew this from tents and travel, the occasional early mornings in Haven when he would glance out his window and see her already working with the apothecary on the day. It was the Dalish in her, the huntress, and later, he would learn, the farmer’s daughter. For Sene, sleep was practical and uncomplicated, a means to an end, and he supposed that sometimes, she just needed more of it. The night before had been paramount—it was a change, for both of them. Perhaps she was just processing. Sleep was not always dreaming, he was coming to terms with this.

In some ways, Solas needed Sene’s stable simplicity, though he didn’t understand, didn’t fully appreciate it at the time. All he saw of it, all he could locate was her speed. She seemed to move so fast, through the day, through her feelings and uncertainties, and it could be confusing and even at times a little annoying, but it was her. And it was more her lightness that implied her speed than anything else. She did not hang onto things like Solas did, pressing them way down deep. She let them go, and so she seemed to move very fast where he did not. Everything is relative. Sometimes, she needed prodding, but she always let go of her fears and her demons—deep into the night, into the air, like balloons and bubbles, one by one by one by one. She helped him do the same, but with Solas, it was just a much longer, much bigger process. Because his life was longer, heavier, and he was older, in more ways than one, and the older we get, the deeper we settle into our reality. It is a defense mechanism against the uprooting, cold tendencies of life. And up until Sene, Solas's life had been a time of loss and constant adaptation. He lost his father, and he adapted. He lost Ghil, and he adapted. He lost his mother, and he adapted. He lost his city and his allies and his friends. He lost Mythal. And he adapted. He was an adaptable man, but it was nice to sit still for once, he would soon learn, and even if he still was adapting, fundamentally, it wasn't for survival. It wasn't sad. It wasn't convincing himself that he could somehow salvage the thing that was lost.  It was for happiness, steadiness, and not just Sene, because like every other aspect of life, Sene was fleeting. Sene was not forever. Neither was he. This is mortality. It was the idea that whatever happens, he would not be alone, and he would not have to do everything alone anymore. Adaptation is a lifelong struggle, but the ability to adapt with others, with friends and equals who loved him as _Solas,_ just Solas, meant that it would all be okay.

The bedsheets were warm and gathered around him that morning. She’d kicked them off at some point in the night. She lie on her side now, curled into the pillow, the red hair more like a nest that hid her face than anything. So different, here. So close to the ground, that’s what he felt. Unlike before, when he slept in a bed in the clouds. This was the earth. This was his blood. Stars and earth, at once. She was not naked anymore, this he noticed, too. At some point in the night, she’d thrown on a shirt, and this choice she had made, no matter how insignificant, was a total mystery to him, just like her hair, and just like Sene was bound to be, and this was invigorating in the moment, and the shirt was pulling up in the back, only a little, exposing skin and freckles that he could still taste.

But he did not touch, not then. He would touch her soon. He left her be, let her sleep. He just waited, quietly, for her to rouse as he could sense her on the surface of her dreaming and knew that she soon would. He got up, and he put his feet on the floor, and he felt the sunlight pouring in through the high, clean windows of Skyhold, and he breathed.


	62. Rites of Solemnity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fifteen months later, on the wedding day of Sene and Solas. Part one of two.

_1 - Forces of Nature_       

“Fuck,” said Sene, tugging at the straps of her dress. It was a simple cream-colored thing of delicate Antivan lace, made by Aunt Yara. She was standing in her bedroom in the yellow morning sun, in front of a very tall, non-magical mirror. Her mother was pinning the ceremonial flowers in her hair—white daisies and yellow daffodils. Meanwhile, Lea sat in a chair by the window, tying boutonnieres for the men out of bits of purple berry and moss and daisies to match Sene’s hair.

“What’s the matter, sweetheart?” said Lea. “You look like a breath of spring.”

“She probably just remembered that she hasn’t had enough coffee yet this morning,” said Rasha.

“Shh,” said Sene, smooshing her chest with both hands. “This is not about coffee.”

“I love that you call her Isene,” said Lea. “It is a beautiful name.”

“Thank you,” said Rasha. “Revasan, of course, likes Sene. I like it, too. It’s just a bit simple, if you ask me.”

“Excuse me,” said Sene. “Am I invisible?”

“No,” said Rasha. “Of course not.”

Sene sighed dramatically, dropped her head back. This annoyed Rasha with all the pins and the flowers. “Hold still, Isene.”

“I never wanted this much lace.”

“What?” said Rasha. “You liked the lace yesterday. And the day before.”

“My tits are just too fucking small,” said Sene. “The lace draws attention to my small tits.”

Rasha gave her a look in the mirror, and then she started laughing.

“What?” said Sene. “What is so funny?”

“I’ve never once heard you complain about your tits before,” said Rasha, pushing a piece of her own red hair out of her face. Hers was nearly bigger than Sene’s, but much lighter in color, almost strawberry blond. “Big tits weigh a woman down, do they not? You’re too quick for tits. You’re an athlete, Isene. You’d just end up strapping them down.”

“I must second that,” said Lea.

“I don’t need big ones,” said Sene. “ _Any_ would be good.” She sighed, exasperated, a new habit she’d developed since becoming Inquisitor. “ _Any._ I can’t believe I’ve never thought to complain about this before.”

“Your tits are perfect,” said Rasha.

“Maybe I could get Dorian to come and magic me some tits, just for the day.”

This caught Lea’s attention. “Magic tits?” she said. “Why ask the Best Man? Why don’t you just ask your magical groom?”

“Because he’d never do it. I think he likes my flat tits.” Admitting this suddenly seemed to embarrass her. She blushed and looked down at her bare feet. “Probably too much information for present company.”

Lea just laughed. “Not at all,” she said.

Rasha plucked a pin from Sene’s head to rearrange one of the curls. “Fucking ouch,” said Sene. “Can’t you be any gentler?”

“Sorry, dear.”

“If I may,” Lea continued, fixing the twine to the berries with her nimble fingers. She was nearly finished. “While on the subject of your tits, perhaps it is time for a lesson in _men._ ”

Rasha smiled, red cheeked, looking a little like Sene, only her eyes were very blue and much sadder, and so it was difficult to peg them as one and the same. “Fenedhis,” she whispered.

Lea smirked. “That word, and its origins, will fit nicely with my point.”

Sene face-palmed. Rasha seemed confused. “What do you mean?”

“Mom,” said Sene, covering her eyes, like as long as she couldn’t see it, her mother’s naiveté did not exist. “Fenedhis means _wolf’s cock_.”

“And?” said Rasha. It took her a moment. When she figured it out, she looked away, at the floor, then out the window with a hairpin between her lips, scandalized. “Oh my gods.”

“Indeed,” said Lea.

“Oh, Lea,” said Rasha, becoming suddenly remorseful, “I’m so sorry. I won’t say that anymore.”

Lea just shrugged. “It is the way of the world now. People swear by my son’s cock. What is a mother to do? Though Sene is quite important. Some might say that her legend rivals that of Andraste herself. Perhaps one day, the world will forget all about Solas and swear by her small tits instead.”

Rasha laughed to herself. “That would be a good story.”

“Fuck me,” said Sene, pulling both hands down her face. She felt like a candle. Maybe she would melt into the floor and just stick there till someone chiseled her off with a butter knife. “What does this have to do with anything?”

“Right,” said Lea, holding up one of the boutonnieres, admiring her handiwork. “I was just going to say that, when it comes to something like tits, men are not nearly as discerning as you think, Sene. Not even my son.”

“So what?”

“You’ve met Mythal,” Lea said. “You’ve seen her, up close and personal. Miniature princess. Like somebody stole her right out of a music box.”

“And?”

“You never met Ghil,” Lea went on, “but let me reassure you, that girl, however pretty, was a beanpole. And short. At least you’re tall. At least you’ve got an ass.”

“Ghilan’nain was a beanpole?” said Rasha.

Lea rolled her eyes. “Gods yes. Sweet girl, never ate a thing. Or, she ate cookies. And soup. Otherwise all she did was smoke.”

“Smoke?” said Rasha, a little intimidated, for certain, but intrigued. She was Dalish in her soul, but Rasha, despite not being a true Lavellan, did have that Lavellan sensibility—curious, open-minded. It was probably why Revasan had loved her from the start. She was inquisitive and odd and even artistic in her thinking. These things became dampened over the years, under the deluge of tragedy, which caused her to mold heavily into Revasan and his points of view, but they were still there, and they were resurfacing little by little, more and more every day. The gods could be mortal, and the gods could be flawed. She was willing to accept this. In fact, it helped her to eventually understand why Sene had had her vallaslin removed, and though she did not consider following suit, it was not out of loyalty to any god, but out of loyalty to her culture, a culture that she lost, and yet one that saved her, and this also made her loyal to a certain status quo that she, as a forty-year-old woman, had come to embrace. So she was smiling at this, sort of surprised. It was such a relief for Sene—such an unholy relief, that her mother, like her, could be at once so passive but also so secure. “What did she smoke?”

“Elfroot,” said Lea, her cheeks a little bronzed—she rarely wore make-up. It was noticeable. “A lot of it. But let’s speak of her no more for now. I just wanted to say that none of Solas’s women have ever had much for tits, Sene. In fact, most women don’t. Most women are not perfect and shapely in their beauty. Some are, and gods love them. But for most women, their beauty is unique. Whatever that means, I know what it means to you.”

“What does it mean to me?” said Sene, genuinely curious. Like Solas, Lea seemed able to read her in ways that she could not even read herself.

Lea continued. “Solas and Mythal, Solas and Ghilan’nain. I know how you sometimes create false comparisons in your mind, sweetheart. I’m just reassuring you, because it is your wedding day, and a bride should always stand reassured on her wedding day—my son, your groom, however powerful and enchanting, however legendary in his actions, is, at the end of the day, a typical man like any other. He loves tits, and he loves yours best, no matter what they’re shaped like. This, I promise.”

Lea had said all of this without once looking up. It was many hard truths, but hard truths were good for Sene. They didn’t let her go on in pity for herself, which she sometimes tended to do, because like any young woman, she was still a little insecure about who she was.

“I must agree,” said Rasha. “About men. They’re simple creatures. Even yours.”

Sene blushed. “Thanks,” she said, looking down at her bare feet. It was good to be reminded sometimes—he _was_ just a man.

And she missed him then—Solas. His bare hands, and how hard he had worked that year. How he’d build the fence around their yard and painted it white. He built eight new eluvians to help stabilize the Veil, which was fucked up magical work but she would still watch every now and again from the kitchen window, a good distance between them. It was a combination of smithing, carpentry, glass-cutting, sculpture, and some sort of mathematical, cosmic power that she’d never seen before. She couldn’t even see the magic, where it left his hands, and went into the mirrors. It just happened, slowly, in increments that she did not notice so that one moment he was simply putting together a beautiful decoration, and the next, it was a doorway into a wormhole through space and time. Dagna and Sera had come to stay with them for about a month during the previous winter. Dagna had wanted to observe Solas on an academic capacity. Sene and Sera would go on hunts together, relive some of their former glory, which usually consisted of two hours in the woods and then lengthy visits to the Inquisition scouts and soldiers at Caer Bronach who would share their booze and their stories with the girls beneath the chilly night sky like a star field.

What Solas was doing with the Veil and the mirrors, Sene could only describe as some form of advanced, highly magical arcanism, and it made her remember how, once, a long time ago, he had referred to his father as such—an _arcanist—_ and she knew now that this was what he’d meant. Though she also knew, innately and through many storytelling sessions with Lea, that Marin had not been capable of the sorts of things Solas could do. Marin was a very good architect and structural engineer with a lot of power. He had planned and built many beautiful, magical structures during the course of his life, and he was a true artist. But whatever Solas’s power had been, though its origins might have came from his father, its magnitude—that was the blood of a noble evanuris, and sometimes, if we’re being truthful, it still unnerved Sene to think of it.

But then he would come inside at the end of a long, heavy day of building, and he would fall onto the couch, heavy and tall, and he would stare at the ceiling, exhausted, red in his cheeks, sweating, and he would turn his head toward her as she entered the room, and he would smile and say, “Hello, vhenan. What shall we do for dinner?” And it would all go back to normal, and she would remember how all of this—all this magic he had inherited from Mythal, all of these things he had to do, it was so that he could fix their world and make it stronger, and that this was, at least, in part, so that he could provide for her and for them, for the chance they’d taken together, and she would feel proud, though a little self-important and fanciful in her pride, and certainly naïve, but she would give up all of her fears just to be with him, and she’d go lay on top of him on the couch and absorb the sweat and smell from his body into her hair and her clothes, and she would burrow into him, hard, and say that she wanted pancakes for dinner. “Let’s go into the village,” she would say, and he would say, “All right, the village it is,” and she would wait for him to clean up and change, and they would go together, walk the half mile or so it was from their house to New Crestwood, and sit down in the café where everybody knew them, and they would order pancakes from the nice girl at the bar and a bottle of wine, and they would eat by the light of a candle and feel very safe, very free. Sene knew who she was when she was with Solas.

That morning, the morning of her wedding, she felt her mother looking at her in the mirror as she smoothed a hand through her Sene’s clean but perpetually tangled hair. She finally gave up on the pins and just let it fall however it would, and she nodded, as if she knew exactly what Sene was thinking. Sene: the open book. “You look beautiful, Isene,” she said finally. “You look just like you should.”

Then Lea piped up, “I agree. And who needs big tits when you’ve got big hair?”

It was enough to make Sene laugh, in spite of herself, and she fluffed her hair a little in the back and tucked it behind her ears. “Yes, well. I still wish they were a little bigger,” she said.

“I can relate to that,” said Lea. “Not like I’ve got much for knockers.”

“Me neither,” said Rasha.

They all sat there with their small tits, engrossed with their respective tasks and journeys on such a magical day as this.

 

_2 - Don't Stop Believing_

In the kitchen, meanwhile, Revasan was helping Kieran with his cuff links while struggling with his own.

“You’d think I could shove a miniature barbell through my own sleeve,” he said, fiddling with the little gold piece. They were all beautiful, made of yellow gold and baroque pearls of many pale, stony colors. Dorian, the Best Man, had had a pair made for each of the groomsmen as well as the men in Sene’s immediate family. “Where is your mother,” Rev said to Kieran. “She lived in a castle for several years. She might be able to do this.”

“She’s outside helping with the flowers,” said Kieran. He voice was starting to change—only in small ways. He was eleven years old and getting bigger. “I can go and get her.”

“Nevermind,” said Rev. “You _should_ go offer to help her with that though, the flowers. Chivalry is important. Be a good son.”

Kieran smiled, and he shrugged. “Yes, sir,” he said, and he blew through the front door, right past Cullen who was coming inside from the patio.

“Maker’s Breath,” said Cullen. “Was that Kieran?”

“Like a flash,” said Rev.

“He’s getting very tall,” said Cullen. “I don’t think I noticed that before. Though I suppose it makes sense.”

“Morrigan is a small woman,” said Rev. “Was her husband big?”

“I don’t think they were ever married,” said Cullen, fussing with his sleeve. “But, yes. Warden Matthew Cousland was no small man. Probably about your size, to be honest.”

“Interesting,” said Revasan.

The rest of the groomsmen—Dorian, Thom, Bull, Abelas, and Cole, were all on the porch now, playing cards, or at least they had been. Some diffusion had happened after Thom lost his belt. Solas didn’t want to get anyone naked on the day of his wedding—other than his bride, of course, said it was bad manners. “I suppose Morrigan is not in here,” he said.

“Having trouble with your cuff links?”

“Indeed.”

“I am humbled,” said Revasan, “that the Commander of my daughter’s army also stands thwarted by sartorial decoration.”

“I am completely hopeless,” said Cullen, beside himself with annoyance. “Dorian won’t assist on account of principle, says I ought to be able to do it myself by now, called me a Chantry boy. And he won’t let Solas help either. He won’t let Solas lift a finger. Bloody tyrant. Solas, being Solas, of course, just smirks.”

“Yes, well,” said Revasan. “We all have our talents. You and I happen to suck at this particular skill. Perhaps a woman will happen by, eventually, to save our souls. Though let’s hope it is not Sene, or my wife. They probably don't even know what cuff links are. We may have money in Clan Lavellan, but we’re ruddy farmers. We don’t do _formal_ very often.”

“I can understand that,” said Cullen. He straightened his bowtie, looked out the window. He saw a Dalish elf in a straw hat weaving flowers around a rustic wooden arch in the yard. She had a small infant strapped to her chest. He took this to be Abelas’s wife, El. “I am fond of the weather in Crestwood,” he said. “Aren’t you?”

Just then, a woman happened by. She came in like a pretty bird, without a care in the world. Neither Cullen nor Revasan recognized her at first, though she seemed to know her way around that kitchen—she was small and brunette, wearing a simple yellow dress, her pale skin a little rosy with the sun. She was whistling and coming inside to make a pot of tea.

At some point, she looked up and nodded to the men, demure and without expectation. Then, Cullen realized who she was right away.

“Cassie?” he said.

She turned to smile at him, very warm. “Yes, Commander,” she said. “You recognized me. I didn’t think you would.”

“Not at first,” he said.

“Well, you look dashing,” she said. “I am unused to you without your armor.”

He blushed, sort of squinting at her. “Thank you. You look lovely as well.”

“You’re kind,” she said, smiling. “As a lowly cotton widow, one rarely sees me in anything but…cotton. Silk is a step up.”

Revasan, sensing his exit, smiled sharply and held out his hand. “I am Revasan Lavellan, Sene’s father.”

She shook it, proudly. “I’m Cassie. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”

“How do you know the Inquisitor?” said Revasan.

“I’m afraid I’m just an Inquisition rescue case, nothing fancy,” she said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Bandits killed my husband on the road, not far from here actually.” She dropped her hand, busied herself with the teapot. “Hence, _cotton widow._ ”

Revasan shoved his hands in his pockets, along with the cuff links. “That is tragic,” he said. “I am so sorry for your loss, Cassie.”

“No worries,” she said, a little sad, but smiling steadfast. She put on a good show, lit the stove. “It was a year and a half ago. Solas came along, and he killed most of the bandits and rescued me. I was hugely pregnant. I had nowhere to go, so I lived at Skyhold for a while after that. I had my baby there. And now my son will have many men to look up to, the Commander numbered among them. All thanks to Solas, and Sene of course. I don’t know where I’d be without them.”

“Where is he now?” said Cullen.

“Solas is on the patio in the garden, I think. Weren’t you just out there?”

“I meant your little son. Will.”

“Oh,” she glanced back through the airy, clean blue kitchen. “In the yard, with Sene’s aunt. Fisara? The older one.”

“Yes, that is her name,” said Revasan, smiling. “Great aunt, to be certain. I think I’ll go meet him, if you’ll excuse me, and I’ll get a little help with these cuff links from Great Aunt Fisara while I’m at it.”

“Of course,” said Cassie. “It was very nice to meet you, Revasan. But before you go, if you don’t mind, I have a question.”

“Ask away,” said Rev.

“All of the elves in Sene’s life are so tall. Even the women. Why is that? Why are you all so tall.”

Rev shrugged, smiling, very canny. “Must be the farmer genes,” he said. “My lady.” And he went out the front door.

Cassie and Cullen stood together in the kitchen, the wind moving through the curtains, making them dance. Cullen watched her set the kettle on the fire and take the cups and saucers out of the cupboard over the basin sink.

“ _My lady,_ ” she said eventually. “What a jokester.”

“Is this your first time at Sene and Solas’s house?” said Cullen.

“No,” she said, glancing. “We came once, right when they moved in. I had to settle some affairs with the final sale on the farm. Sene and Solas let us stay in their guestroom.”

“You and Cole?”

She smiled. “No. Just me and Will.”

“Right,” said Cullen, straightening up with his hands behind his back. “You and Cole have always been very close. I assumed too much. I apologize.”

“He kept me safe when I was in a very dark place,” she said. “I’ll be forever grateful. And I know what people must think about us, and that’s fine. But to be honest, he is a little young for me, and a little…odd. We’re good friends, but I’m not terribly sure he’s interested in women, or men for that matter.”

“That is a good point,” said Cullen, staring at his brown leather shoes. “Cole is…a conundrum.”

Cassie shrugged at this, easy-going. She smelled a little like Josie, he thought, like maybe she’d borrowed some of her expensive perfume. He felt a tug in his heart, like a memory. So much had happened, and over the past year, many of the people he had begun to count on as friends began to spread out. He bought some land in Ferelden about a year before, and he saw Alistair from time to time, as well as Morrigan and Kieran and Sene and Solas who all lived somewhat nearby, but Sene and Solas had been very busy, and it was never enough without the ongoing pressure of his work. He thought of moving to Crestwood, just to be here. It felt familiar, like home. Before the Inquisition, it had been a very long time since Cullen had really considered anyone to be his friend, particularly women. Sene had been a convenient factor for him early on, as she was pretty and mild, and she was with him when he’d decided to quit the lyrium. He’d liked Morrigan, too, but that wasn’t simple. Morrigan held no interest in him beyond friends, or any man for that matter, though she seemed grateful for him and their shared history and his relationship with Kieran, and this was enough.

Cullen was used to it by now. The idea of devoting oneself so fully to one’s own grief and regret and subsequent sense of duty that the notion of loving another becomes, not burdensome, but too heavy of a risk to bear. He put his hands in his pockets in the sunny kitchen, prepared to go back outside, face the music and the men.

“Hey,” said Cassie, out of nowhere. It took him by surprise. She took one of the hands from his pockets and examined the loose cuffs. She smiled. “Do you need help with these?”

He looked down at his own hand, in hers, as if shocked. She had freckled knuckles and clear nails. “I—yes, actually. Do you know how?”

“I do,” she said. “A cotton widow must be versed in all things sartorial. I did Cole’s as well. Can I?”

“Please do.”

Her hands were not soft—they were tough, those of a woman who had grown up in the wild. A little like Sene’s, and a little like Morrigan’s, but bigger. She had good hands, well-used, as she put together his cufflinks in the kitchen.

“Thank you, Cassie,” he said, once she’d finished, admiring her handiwork. “You’ve saved me a great deal of time and embarrassment.”

“No problem,” she said. A piece of hair had gotten caught in her mouth. She put it behind her ear. “You should get back to Solas now. A groom must never be left alone on his wedding day.”

“He’s not alone,” said Cullen, smiling at her. “In fact, Dorian hasn’t left his side since this morning. I can’t tell if he’s doing it just to be a fly buzzing in his ear. He’s a little like that.”

“Well then,” she said. The teapot began to whistle. This divided her attention. “Perhaps you can help me with this? There are a lot of cups and saucers here. I’d have to take two trips otherwise.”

“Who is the tea for?” said Cullen.

“Sene’s aunts. And her grandmother from Antiva City.”

“Sene has a grandmother from Antiva City?”

“Yes,” said Cassie. “And a grandfather. They’re Revasan’s parents. I think they live there full time now, snow bunnies. Or whatever. Not like it snows much in the Free Marches.” She looked at him, confused. “Does it snow in the Free Marches, Commander?”

“Sometimes,” said Cullen. “Not often where Sene is from.”

“Anyway,” she said, taking a deep breath. “They all want tea, that is what I know, and they want it at the exact same time, so I offered to get it for them. They’re all so big and tall and beautiful and strange. I don’t know what to make of these people.”

“They’re rich,” said Cullen. “That can make people seem weird, in my experience, even Dalish elves. In fact, I would have thought they’d be drinking champagne by now, given their reputation.”

“They’ve already finished the champagne,” she said. “They’ve got into the rum. That’s why I’m in here. They’re going to put it in their tea.”

Cullen laughed at this. “I should have known,” he said. “Of course I’ll help. I do owe you after that bit of business with the cuff links, after all.”

“You owe me nothing, Commander,” she said as she set the cups on the serving tray, one by one.

He watched her, closely, curious, how she worked so simple, so effortless but with so much intent, doing these little things. Making tea, fixing cuff links. Like each move she made was calculated, and yet, he knew that it was not. It was instinct, just her. “Just call me Cullen,” he said.

“Hmm?”

“You are not my soldier,” he went on, “nor are you my ward. Just call me Cullen.”

“Cullen?” She smiled at this, with pink cheeks. It seemed to take her off guard, disarm her even. “Very well,” she said, full of sincerity. “Cullen.”

There was hope for them yet.

 

_3 - Lovers' Walk_

Sene and Solas’s property in Crestwood was not vast, but it was big—about ten acres of feral, independent land, some of it fallow crop soil, some of it marshy fens. Their immediate yard was comprised of a vegetable garden and a small red barn, where they kept two dairy cows as pets. Solas built a new fence around the immediate surrounding acre, and there was a long, dusty walk that lead from their doorstep, all the way down to Old Market Road. The old woman who had lived there before, Rebecca, had moved to Highever to be closer to her daughter, and she sent a letter every now and again, checking in on the old place, and checking in on Sene and Solas, usually along with some odd facts she’d remembered about the property and her history there. _There is a storm cellar!_ She wrote in one of the letters—a fact that Sene and Solas had become aware of the first week they moved in. _I should have mentioned that upon closing. I’m sorry, loves!_ In another, she reminded them that the fen at the back of the property had been known to attract wyverns every few seasons in the past. _Only when they breed,_ the letter said, _a schedule as unpredictable as the wind. The soil is easy to farm,_ she wrote in one of the letters, _so take advantage of that. You, especially, Sene. Gardening is good for a woman._ And she even divulged a story about how her husband, who had, like Solas, been a man of carpentry, had built the porch swing to last 1,000 years. _It will never break or fall, I swear!_ she said. _But if it does, then for the love of Andraste, Ser Solas, fix it!_

Sene and Solas enjoyed Rebecca’s letters, something lovely to look forward to as they built their own home inside her old house. Lea came down twice to help them plant their garden. Sene and Solas very much liked maintaining it, together, and making it a part of their daily routine. It was a mixture of flowers, greenery, root vegetables, and citrus—as well as some stranger things that Sene had never seen before. She was fond of the sand daisies, which were a bright and glorious purple, and as long as Solas used magic sort of like a fertilizer every month or so, they would grow in the typical soil of Ferelden just fine, and according to Lea, for as long as he lived, they would never die, not even in winter.

Of the eight eluvians Solas built, he only put one in Ferelden—on their property in Crestwood, down in the storm cellar no less. All of the loose energy caused by the rifts there, and the frays in the magic of the Veil, he said, would be stabilized into one wormhole, attached to the mirror. He placed one in Kirkwall as well, in the Hawke estate, where he believed it would be kept safe from outsiders, and it would allow them a well-guarded and reasonable avenue into the Free Marches. He had all of the mirrors in the Darvaarad destroyed, as well as any mirrors that the Vidassala and her Saarebas had removed from their original locations.

Solas explained to Sene (and to Dorian, of course, who was present for much of Solas’s magical restoration of the Veil) that allowing the network of mirrors to grow could weaken the Veil, simply by virtue of thinning the magic that Solas had used to build and repair it. He wanted to keep the number of eluvians small so that he could track where each one ended and each began, and that way, he could keep the crossroads from expanding in any way without his knowledge. He did not want another infiltration, by a Saarebas or by anyone else claiming godhood on his turf, and he did not want another Breach. The only mages allowed unfettered access to the mirrors were his mother, Mythal, Morrigan, Abelas, and himself. Flemeth would not have access, and neither would any of the remaining Sentinels. He had offered the key to Dorian, but Dorian refused, claiming that a Tevinter should have no such access to ancient elvhen magic, no matter how close he was to its creator. Solas also created a holographic map of all the mirrors and their locations, and he would project it sometimes in the living room of their house, or in their garden, or on the roof, just to show Sene how it worked.

There were hundreds of his mirrors still scattered throughout Thedas, all mapped now and accounted for—most of them in the mountains, or in the forested regions of western Orlais, as well as in Northern Tevinter, in what had used to be Arlathan and its surrounding kingdoms, cities, and the Backwater by the Sea. Places like the Arbor Wilds, then up through the Emerald Graves and into the Emprise du Lion and the lonely snow dunes of the Frostbacks were littered with eluvians, nearly all of them hidden by decaying magics or in sealed tombs underground, or behind folds in the energy of the Veil meant to conceal their presence completely. The south of Orlais, close to the Well of Sorrows, was where many of Mythal’s followers, refugees, and her Sentinel soldiers congregated during Solas’s rebellion. Meanwhile, he built sanctuaries for freed slaves in the Hundred Pillars, the Frostbacks, as well as in the in-between worlds that could be reached only by his eluvians.

Life was an escape act back then—that is what he eventually, in his current life, came to ponder. He and Mythal stayed nowhere for long. Skyhold was _their_ refuge in the end of days, but that’s all that it was. It was never a home, not really, not in the way that one unaccustomed to the blast of war might define a home. They did what they could but it was treacherous, and he knew now how far they had stretched their bargain with fate, and that the end of world was ultimately out of their hands. Even still, statues in his honor, and in the honor of Mythal, can be found in these places, and in the discarded mystery corners of Orlais.

And then there was Ferelden. Ferelden, before it was Ferelden, had been a warzone. It is true, and it is worth mentioning. Sparsely populated, indistinguishable from some fringe sector where evanuris sent their armies to steal and plunder and enslave and nothing more. Toward the end, in fact, it was around whereabouts in the Exalted Planes, and eventually, Crestwood, that Ghilan’nain found herself, cloistered, freed of her vallaslin by Andruil, but cowed into submission by her as well. Any armies she’d been given were just pawns by then, far outside of her control and utilized only as distraction while the real war was being fought in the north, far away—the war for Arlathan. Ghil did not know it, but she was just a pawn as well, like her stupid armies, there to be used against the Wolf when the time was right. This is a history lesson, in brief.

Because, perhaps you're wondering why Crestwood is so beautiful. Its flowers and grasses and fens and big sky. It is because of Ghil. There is a reason that little pool in that little cave bears her halla statues. Ghil was powerful. Her power might not have been violent or abrupt, and maybe this was the problem. It was not made of lightning or spools of world-sucking energy, but it was deep, and it was strange, colored by years of observing and nursing her magic in the image of Solas’s mother Leanathy. She planted flowers to pass the time, and she built and herded halla and made beautiful groves of freshwater and marshy rivers and forests that would become the Korcari Wilds and the fens where Solas now lived, and she filled her rivers and lakes with fish and lizards and the sky with birds and the land with fertile soil, and she waited for him, for Solas. Almost like she knew.

And he came so sparely back then, and when he did, he came with stories of insurrection that made her nervous. She became weary, and hopeless. Andruil had stuck her down south and handed her a faction that loved her—not because they were compelled to, but because she was kind and unwilling to deal her own means of destruction and enslavement. A little like Mythal, she did not have the bravery to use their loyalty as a means of breaking the cycle of slavers and enslaved. But unlike Mythal, she did not have the means and the resources to manipulate the cycle however she wanted, and she did not have the Wolf, channeling his anger into a rebellion that would not only break the cycle, but eventually end the world as they knew it. Ghil knew about them, and even still, she spent a long time reminding herself that she held no claim over him in her flower gardens, but praying beyond prayer that what he had with Mythal had been merely per convenience. At some point, of course, Ghil saw that it was love between them, and she lost herself and any sense of who she was and where she’d come from, and the rest is, by definition, history. It was a tragedy.

But in her mind, she was so bereft. All those years on her pawn’s errand, relying solely on her power, a power that was, no matter how subtle and beautiful, too big and untamed and it ate into her soul and left her resentful and sad, and so to process this and her regret over Mythal, in the final days before her imprisonment, she planted weird magics in the earth, magics she had observed off Lea during her teenage years and then adapted for herself, magics filled with anger and defeat and aggression, all of these things she could not otherwise express to anyone, magics of a true evanuris, magics that would, one day, spark life inside the earth and give birth to dragons. It was a price. Perhaps it is why the Veil has always been thin in Crestwood. So many different magics piled on top of each other. Nobody really knows for sure. In any case, this is, I suppose, another story altogether now.

Most of this, Solas would never know, because he was not there. Or what little he did know, he did not understand. His new life in Crestwood was just coincidence. He still thought about Ghil, even now, still loved her, regretted that he could not save her, but he knew as well that, just like everything else with his young life, circumstances were shit for them, and there was so little he could have done to save her that he had not done already, and so he tried to breathe, as a man now, and to move forward like he had always meant to do, but he never forgot her. It would be a mistake to believe that he forgot her, or that he did not take care of her memory and her essence where it lived now in the Fade, and that he did not experience some regret. Time heals all wounds, but wounds leave scars.

All of his eluvians, Solas had to visit as he repaired the Veil. Sene was always with him, and sometimes, Morrigan, too, or Dorian or Abelas or all three. The process was painstaking, and it took a great deal of time and magic. By the end of that year, Solas was exhausted, most of the magic he had inherited from Mythal depleted, but the Veil was strong again, and intact. The rifts were gone. The Inquisition was then tasked with activating ancient, magical machines all over Thedas—machines that, during his reign, Solas had built, and that his rebels had planted throughout Ferelden, Orlais, the Free Marches, and Tevinter. These strange artifacts were like very small magical reserves, indestructible, there to fortify the Veil in the event of a failsafe. The Temple of Mythal, meanwhile, was being rebuilt and made a sanctuary for former Sentinels still struggling to integrate—this task was lead by Abelas and his new Dalish wife, El, and they would travel there as often as they could, via the eluvian on Sene and Solas’s property, and El would bake and teach the men—all of them big and beautiful and prized and frightened men—how to raise cows and grow crops, how to be okay, and Abelas would teach them about the smallness and yet bigness of nature in the wake of Elvhenan. And he would teach them the secret of _gifts_. Many of them, still powerful mages and loyal to Solas, had their vallaslins removed and joined the Inquisition. There were about eighty left that Abelas could account for, but some of them were still scattered to the wind.

Mythal would not return to her temple for many years. She knew that it was selfish, but the idea of its decay devastated her beyond comprehension. She did not want to imbue her remaining Sentinels with false hope. They were not her men anymore. She was not a goddess, and they needed to find their own path, free of her, forever. She did face Abelas. She went to his wedding, and she sat in the back with tears on her cheeks as he took El’s hand in marriage rites, and that very night, after meeting El, Mythal would fall into Abelas’s arms and weep inconsolably as he pet her hair and told her it was all okay. He was stronger now, and while he was not cured of his traumas, he no longer dreamed in shades of blood and broken towers and the grief of Fen’Harel. He worked his farm, and El became pregnant right away. Together, they would travel north to Sene and Solas’s wedding in Crestwood with a three-month-old baby in tow.

Mythal stayed with Lea in the Backwater still, night fishing and drinking champagne in the afternoons, learning to grow coffee and sometimes weirder things like papayas and passion fruit. And sometimes, the two of them would leave, and go to Kirkwall—as witches in the wild. The last of Solas’s eight new eluvians had been outfitted and placed in the valley below his mother’s treehouse. _I am not going to take a swim in a demonic wishing well every time I want to see you_ —that is what he said to her, though she thought it unnecessary. The eluvian routed into the Korcari Wilds still, where Flemeth’s soul slept in gratitude but with no access to the mirrors or the Crossroads, and that mirror routed to the leaded cellar in Hawke’s mansion. So, every now and again, when Hawke and Fenris would be sitting in their living room, reading the post or playing cards, or in the kitchen drinking a Lavellan red and making dinner as the wind blew through the curtains, Lea and Mythal would pop through and scare the living shit out of them, and they would exit into Hightown, and go down into Lowtown where the Hanged Man had been restored and made into an enchanting feat of debauchery, and they would sit at the bar in their dresses and drink mead with the buskers and the sailors and the blacksmiths and the jewelers, and this was their life—for now, at least—the oldest elves in the world.

 

 _4 -_ _Foxhole in the Garden_

Solas leaned in the garden with his hands in his pockets, cuff links linked. He was admiring his fence, low but sturdy. Of all the things he’d built that year, this was his favorite. His life had grown so quiet. Everything was so quiet, especially now that the Veil was calm. The nights, the mornings. He lived for it—this sweet stasis. He would wake, and Sene would already be up and about in the world, and this was comforting, that she naturally took the day first, kept it warm for him. Outside, rooting around in the daisies, she would make noise, and this was also reassuring. Once, she caught a frog. She laughed so loud, it woke him, and he went outside, shirtless in the day. It was a huge frog as big as her hands. They named it Wilbur, and then, together, they took a walk and set it free in the fens. One day, they found a nest of wyvern eggs down there, like Rebecca had promised, down in the fens, and they spent a day and a night relocating them to a nearby cave and coaxing the mother, peacefully, with a fresh ram carcass hunted and cleaned by Sene. They knew that it was hubris, but they were trying to earn her trust. It worked, somehow. Perhaps they could make a bargain with the other creatures who walked here, if they were not so hasty. Nothing is born hostile, Solas had learned.

He was watching Cullen now help Cassie bring tea to the Lavellan women. Full of laughter, Yara sat at a picnic table with her red-cheeked baby, about a year old now, stumbling around in the grass by her feet. El sat across from her now, infant child strapped to her chest, and together, they were served tea, and Yara took hers with rum. Fisara was nearby, helping Kieran arrange and prune the flowers along the walk—flowers grown by Solas’s mother. Cullen handed her a cup of tea, and she regarded him as much more than a handsome, hulking, human man and pinched his cheek. He blushed, and Cassie laughed. Solas smiled at this summery display.

“The Commander and the widow,” said Dorian, pithy. “Why didn’t we see this before?”

“We were busy,” said Solas. “Perhaps you’ve forgotten.”

"She seemed so attached to Cole back at Skyhold. That whole bit with her husband was grisly.”

“I don’t believe they were ever romantic,” said Solas. “Cassie and Cole. Just friends.”

“Well, then it is about time, I suppose. Cullen must dust off his chivalry and use it on an available woman. He seems the sort of man who would be happier with a partner, don’t you think?”

“I agree,” said Solas, turning to face him. Hands still in his pockets, he was taller than Dorian by about three inches. “We got your wedding gift, by the way. I meant to tell you last night.”

“I assume you’ve already exhausted its teachings.”

“We’re not much for tantric sex,” said Solas. He found a hair pin in his pocket, set it between his teeth. “But Sene likes the book. She thinks the cover is pretty. So it’s sitting on our bureau in the bedroom.”

“What I intended, of course,” said Dorian. “Pretty bureau adornments are my specialty.”

Solas smirked.

“Where is Cole, by the way?” said Dorian.

“I’m up here,” said Cole.

They looked up. He was sitting on the top of the shelving unit Solas had built against the side of the house, right there in the garden.

“Andraste’s blessed tits. Have you been there the whole time?” said Dorian.

He was wearing a brown suit and seemed to be tying pink ribbon to a wicker hat. “Only for twenty minutes. Solas, these shelves are very sturdy. Like nature.”

“Thank you, Cole,” said Solas.

“Sene has been very concerned about the shape of her body,” Cole continued. “I can’t seem to understand, no matter how I listen. What are women made of, Solas? It makes them so odd in their thinking. I cannot always decipher the words. They are shaped like feelings, and yet, they are words. There are no differences.”

Dorian sighed. “Ah, yes. The shape of women is a mystery.”

“Come down, Cole,” said Solas, taking his hands out of his pockets. “I’ll teach you all about it.”

“Very well.” He hopped down, landing hard on his heavy boots. He dusted off his brown slacks and handed the hat to Solas. It was a pale, beautifully woven thing with a wide brim. The ribbon was a dark pink.

“What is this for?” said Solas.

"Your mother,” he said.

Solas held the brim in his hands—sturdy and strong. “You made a hat for my mother?”

“Morrigan did the weaving,” said Cole. “I merely tied the ribbon.”

“What is the occasion?”

“She likes hats,” said Cole. “She always wears them, even if only in her mind. A tough woman, but the light of living is hard on her bones, and the brims are shade. She has traveled a long way from where the sun still dances through clouds of magical winter—spirits, dawn, danger, a palace in the trees, and the trees are always dreaming when she is there. Her power sings the world into being, even as we stand in its grass. She is your only family, Solas. I thought this would make her happy.”

Solas smiled, tracing passed the delicate ribbon. The whole thing was a lovely piece of craftsmanship, made with care. “Thank you, Cole,” said Solas.

“You should thank Morrigan as well. She knits and weaves because she does not know how to approach the world any other way. She wants to say it, but she needs and instrument to communicate her love.”

“Don’t we all?” said Dorian.

“You love the Iron Bull,” said Cole. “Where is he?”

Dorian seemed to blush but hid the sentiment with a great deal of practice. “He and Thom have gone to refill the whiskey.”

“We do not need more whiskey,” said Solas.

“Perhaps not you and I,” said Dorian. “But they are brutes.”

Cole turned to Dorian, like a secret. “Last time Solas leaned, he lost his friend, and the world burned to embers.”

“I’m standing right here,” said Solas.

“Last time he leaned on what?” said Dorian.

Solas sighed, annoyed. “Nothing.”

“I’m sorry,” said Cole. “You’re just so open now, Solas. You did not used to be. Like a hope chest, only now there’s hope. It is a bounty.”

“Don’t be sorry,” said Solas, looking down at the hat. He could feel himself, inside, impatient as he stood in the garden, surrounded by his men. His friends. He loved them, desperately, all of them, but he loved them in the way that men love men who they have fought and lost beside. The way that transcends all else in the face of death, and that is inescapable and pure, and it hurts to think about too much, like staring into the sun, and this is a thing that he had not had before, and to be truthful, it is a great deal of what saved him from himself over the past two years. But in that moment, he did not want to be in the garden, loving his men like it was the end of the world. No matter how he needed them. There were so many different ways to love, and a time and a place for them all. And that day, he just wanted to get married. He missed Sene. That is who he wanted to love today. In any case, he took a deep breath. “You are right Cole,” he said. “And I am just eager. I apologize.”

“He’s talking about the booze?” said Dorian.

Solas nodded once. “Yes.”

“Who is the friend you lost?”

“Sorrow,” said Cole. “But he has been found.”

“I thought so,” said Dorian. “He is a groomsman in your wedding. You were a groomsman in his wedding, were you not? It can’t have been too bad.”

“We mended our friendship,” said Solas, happily. “All is well, as long as everything remains relative.”

“Which it always does,” said Dorian. He clapped a hand to Solas’s shoulder. “Come on, apostate. I know that you have a complicated relationship with your vices, but I do as well, and so I understand. I also know that you have a secret love of champagne, and it is your wedding day, so let me pour you one glass and send you on your merry way to the altar.”

“I do not have a secret love of champagne.”

“Everybody has a secret love of champagne, Solas. Do not lie. Lying no longer becomes you.”

“When did it become me?”

“Never,” said Dorian. “Did I say otherwise?”

Solas closed his eyes and smiled, stretching his patience, stretching, but also deeply thankful. “No, you did not,” he said.

That is when Cole made a noise—a gasp, or a cry.

“What is it?” said Dorian.

“Sene’s Keeper is on his way to the garden!” he said. “He is so silvery. And so tall! Like an ancient tower.”

“We are the same height,” said Solas, looking around. He saw then, Cole was correct. Deshanna was at the front of the yard, dressed up and very trim, stopping to poke a finger at Yara’s little baby. The baby fell down up and started laughing, swatting at his finger until Deshanna stopped to kiss Yara on the head. He then stood tall, hands in his pockets. He had a leather folder tucked under his arm. He made eye contact with Solas and nodded. He was headed toward the garden soon.

“He has plans for you,” said Cole.

“What sort of plans?” said Solas, annoyed, but curious.

“He hopes that you and Sene will have many children. He will love them all equally, but he hopes there will be mages among them.”

Solas gave him a look. He was completely miffed by this. “He wants my mage children?”

“No,” said Cole. “He just wants you to make mage children. The Lavellans have no mages, and when they have your mages—especially your mages—it will only increase their influence.”

Dorian laughed at this.

“What is so funny?” said Solas.

“Solas,” said Dorian, “after everything, you’ve been reduced to a prized magical stallion. It makes perfect sense, of course. You cannot help but play into his hand. You and Sene do want children, do you not?”

Solas sighed, exasperated. He squeezed his thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose and shook his head out, fast. “Ambitious fuck,” he said. Then he looked at Dorian. “Is this what people make of me? Something to breed?”

“You?” said Dorian. “You’re nothing but a huge, handsome warrior, and a fabled elven god with enormous power, high intelligence, and sacred knowledge that spans millennia. An average joe like everybody else. A stallion? The Lavellans could easily do better for their only heiress. Find me after the wedding, Solas. We’ll have a light beer at the pub and discuss the latest in jousting.”

“Be careful, Tevinter,” said Solas.

“Am I wrong?”

“No.”

“Ha!”

“I was born in a treehouse,” said Solas. “Eight feet off the ground. Have I ever told you that?”

“And?”

“And. While my mother was pregnant, my parents rented a room above a bar in the country while my father built that treehouse all by himself. My mother used to have to boil our water before we drank it every morning, because there was no guarantee that it would be clean, and when we finally moved into our actual house, the roof sprung a leak every spring. It was a nightmare. Growing up, after my father was dead, I sold my body to the boxing ring so that I could afford to gamble in the casinos and make money that I would use to buy drugs, which I would later smoke with my girlfriend—who was too good for me, by the way—in the shit alleys and on the rooftops of Arlathan.”

“That all sounds very interesting,” joked Dorian. “Do go on.”

Solas cleared his throat, shook his head. He felt like Sene. What the fuck?

“Solas,” said Dorian, becoming serious. He squeezed Solas’s shoulder, hard, and looked him square in the face.

“What?”

“Take it from me, the royal Magister’s very gay, very estranged son.”

“Take what from you?”

“That value, like anything in life, is relative,” he went on. “You may have been a backwater mutt when you were teenager, and then a striving general climbing a social ladder that you were never meant to climb when you were twenty-three, but now, you’re as pure as they come. You built the ladder. The ladder is your own. And in any case, none of this matters, does it? Because you’re a good man. I know it. Your people know it. Sene knows it.”

“I know it,” said Cole, raising his hand.

Dorian smiled. “Yes, Cole. You know it. And Bull knows it. And Thom. And Deshanna knows it, too. And when you’re a good man, nothing else matters. Am I right? It was you who taught me that, Solas. In the Emprise du Lion, the day before you ran your head into the side of a dragon and almost died.”

Solas handed the hat back to Cole and shoved his hands back in his pockets. Somewhere, a huge pocket of locusts had burst wide open, unleashing their summer song into the air. All of the people in the yard, decorating for the ceremony, looked to see. It was transcendent, as if nature itself had whispered hello, hushing all of existence into obscurity. Solas found himself staring into the sky, like a long window filled with his power. It was knocking on the door. Or, was that just him? His imagination. He would have asked Sene to get it, but she was busy in the garden, her feet bare. He wanted to pick her up and take her home.

“Solas?” said Dorian.

Quietly, the window closed, and the world was simple again. “Yes, Dorian.”

“The Keeper.”

“Hmm?”

Solas came to, completely. It was like surfacing from a strange memory. The old mind plays tricks—at least now he knew what to expect. When he glanced around, Cole had disappeared and Deshanna was there, grinning, proud, with his pale blue eyes all creased and scrunched up. He put a hand on Solas’s shoulder. “Solas, my boy,” he said, very clear now.

“Yes. Deshanna, hello.”

“ _Andaran atish'an, lethal’lin._ Are you ready?”

He took his hands out of his pockets. He fingered the elegant cuff links in his sleeves. “Yes,” he said. “I am ready.”

 

_5 - Enter This Place in Peace_

They took a walk around the house, to the backyard, which was quiet. There were a lot of shade trees back there, and space to run. It was just the red barn from here, where the cows lived and the swallows, and you could almost see the Old Market road, sense the opulence and the carriages as the guests began to arrive. It would not be a massive wedding, but it would not be terribly small. There was little they could do about that, considering who they were. Josie had drafted and revised the guest list herself—114 people. Several Orlesian nobles were expected, and the Empress had sent her regards and promised a fabulous gift upon their next visit to the Winter Palace. There were also many Dalish in attendance, and they had traveled far, in aravels now stationed like a beautiful summer parade in perfect perimeter. With Cullen off-duty, Michel de Chevin ran the security detail, and Leliana of course. She was a bridesmaid, but she always wore her cloak and her hawk’s eyes. There were scouts everywhere, undercover. In the yard, in the village, in the trees overhead. Nobody, unless they were a vetted guest, was allowed within one hundred yards of the property, on all sides. And yet, somehow, as this was the talent of soldiers and spies trained beneath the mantle of the Inquisition, the world felt tranquil, and pure. It was a heavily guarded façade, and while this annoyed him, he would deal. It was a small price to pay in the end.

When he looked around, he saw soldiers in the distance, and he could hear the people back on the other side of the house, but mostly, all he could see and hear was nature. They stopped beneath a wide willow tree. There was a cast iron table and chairs under there, painted red, and little jars filled with magical butterflies. This was where, sometimes, he and Sene would go to sit during the day. Read the paper, drink coffee or wine. Solas waited for Deshanna to sit down, and then he sat across from him. As two very tall men, they had to sit far back from the table. Solas leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. Deshanna opened the leather folder on the table. Inside were the marriage rites, ink on parchment. As Sene’s Keeper, per the rules of Dalish tradition, he would be officiating the ceremony.

“How do you feel?” he said to Solas. “You look good.”

“Thank you,” said Solas. “I feel good. I feel impatient.”

Deshanna smiled at this. “Yes, I can sense that.” He brought his chair forward, just a little. All around them, the tall, yellow grasses rustled in the breeze. “Which part makes you most impatient, Solas?”

“Everything,” said Solas, staring at Deshanna with perfect courage. “I am in a hurry today. I have not been in a hurry in a very long time. You can imagine the discomfort.”

“Why do you think you are in a hurry.”

“I miss her,” he said, plain as day. “I haven’t seen her since yesterday afternoon. Today is our wedding.”

“You are in a hurry to see your bride?”

“Yes, sir.”

Shifting, Deshanna crossed one leg over the other. He was still smiling. It was always hard work, sitting across the table from Solas. However young he was, or young he seemed at times, he was a complex man, wise, and experienced in a great many facets of life, and just incredibly smart. He saw everything, and though he was unused to tradition and somewhat foreign to the notion of familial duty beyond the role of provider, he embraced his role in Sene’s Dalish life. And Deshanna had met no one more beholden to his word and his sworn duties than Solas. He was a man of honor, truly heroic. Still, it was always difficult, grappling with heroes. Deshanna knew this, as any canny man of his nature and status would. Heroes are full of pain, and so they rarely remove their armor. But if approached with the right state of mind, any dalliance with them could yield great rewards.

“As the Keeper of Sene’s clan,” he said eventually, with great importance, “and the officiant of your wedding, it is my job to make sure that all Dalish marriage rites are observed. Most of these you and I have discussed at length already, in preparation for this very day, and one of those rites, as you’ll recall, is to see that the bride and groom both receive necessary counseling in the hour before the ceremony. Your mental health, state of mind—these things should be attended to very closely. Sene is in the company of her mother and yours for this very same reason. Typically, you would be with your father, or your Keeper, or whichever male influence comes first. But since you are not Dalish, and your father has passed, the honor falls to me. I hope that is all right.”

“Of course,” said Solas, nodding slowly. “I have read and memorized the rules many times over, Deshanna. But the guests are only just arriving. You’re early”

“Yes, well. It is scheduled to start in one hour, and I like to keep to schedule. Of course, these sorts of things are never punctual, are they?”

“Well, I am ready to be counseled,” said Solas, smirking. “I am ready for anything.”

“You are a good man,” said Deshanna, unmoving.

“Thank you,” said Solas.

“I say that with an utmost sincerity and admiration. I feel very little need to counsel you, Solas, though I am here for you and anything you may need. You are self-possessed and sure of yourself. It has been an honor getting to know you this past year, and to meet your mother, of course, who is terribly enchanting, and, quite frankly, funny as hell.”

“Don’t tell her that,” said Solas.

“No promises,” said Deshanna, grinning. Just then, a servant arrived, as if out of nowhere. He was a young elf, very fair, and he carried a silver tray with an unlabeled bottle of whiskey and two glass cups. Deshanna smiled, close-lipped, as the servant poured them each one small, neat glass. He was Dalish, a bit young for his vallaslin, a Lavellan, though, to be certain. He left the bottle and tucked the tray under his arm.

“ _Enaste, da’len,_ ” said Solas to the boy.

The boy nodded once, smiled, and left the willow tree, headed back toward the house.

Solas picked up the cup, swirled the liquid around a little, breathed into the glass.

“I know you won’t want too much,” said Deshanna.

“No, I don’t,” said Solas. “I want to be clear.”

“Just one toast,” said Deshanna. He held out his glass. Solas followed suit. “To you,” he said.

Surprised, Solas cleared his throat. “To me?”

“Yes,” said Deshanna. “To you.” And that is all he said.

They touched glasses and sipped in the quietude of the afternoon. In the distance, you could hear the arrival of horses. The voices in the yard had kicked up. The string quartet began to play, and the waiters would be circling with the champagne. Deshanna knew the truth. There was nothing left to do for them but wait, bide their time while the women hurried amidst the flowers and the bubbling champagne, and the men stood by in all of their steadfast concern. This was the way of the world as they knew it, and so they sat, proudly, sipping their booze and their memories like evening, shady and cool and pleasant as the birds and the locusts sang all around.

“That’s a good batch,” Solas said of the whiskey. “What year?”

“9:41,” said Deshanna, examining the color in his glass. “The year you met my niece.”

Solas smiled, glancing down into the wood grain of the table where all of his troubles lived. Because they lived wherever he put them now, and for that moment, this is what he chose. The romance of it all was almost too much to take, but he allowed it. This was a wedding, after all, and the earnestness of these people, despite their rapid agendas and psychotic dispositions—it welcomed him so hard. He often wanted to weep, but he didn’t. He remembered what Deshanna had said to him, that first morning he spent making pancakes at the Lavellan farm, hungover from Revasan’s drugs and struggling to remember the code and rules of blueberries in the batter.

 _You are not a novelty, Solas, are you?_ he said.

No, I am not. Marriage should be the pinnacle between choice and submission. We choose. We offer. Little more, little less. A wedding is just a party.

_You are a man._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dear Readers,
> 
> There will be one more chapter, and an epilogue. Please stay tuned. And thank you for your patience these past few weeks. The holidays, and my angst over ending this thing got the better of me. That said, I am here! And I'm glad you are, too.
> 
> <3,  
> gala


	63. A Great Wind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind carries me across the sky.” -Ojibwe saying

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Each section of this chapter can be read with a song in mind, all by Regina Spektor. In order of reading: 1. _[Tornadoland](https://open.spotify.com/track/2vXpIIyvrPvzU2Ex3suxWz?si=eiedYS7aRzmnsEuFN15AaQ)_ , 2. _[The Light](https://open.spotify.com/track/2kqcD6IM6qMMYOdTdc7KcK?si=D_tmEk9ZRmCsXMhNlZXg7A)_ , 3. _[Black and White](https://open.spotify.com/track/0pXjHxrAfMlUC4HWHihdyX?si=1AgLgwvkTaaR2kR3nG5VMA)_ , and 4. _[The One Who Stayed and the One Who Left](https://open.spotify.com/track/11oLP26oD9bc5G9CtvO92s?si=rnOuFIh2RGKwXYwz0Fho1A)_

_1 - Goodbye, friend._

“Mythal?”

She stood in the grand foyer of the thirteenth floor. Her hair was down. She could feel it, messy in the back, knots from the pillow. She was smoking a cigarette—tobacco rolled up with the elfroot and all of it spiked with a bit of thyme. Whenever she smoked, usually it was poised and debonair and in front of men to prove she was worthy, but this time, it was just to make the room smell warm—like cooking, and childhood. She was alone beneath the tremor of the chandeliers. A doll in her house. Birds etched into the metals. There were no servants, no bellhops or handmaidens or valets for the soldiers. All had gone to their quarters. The Blue Fortress was a lonely, cool place at night, but if you knew how to work it, you could make it your own.

She sensed him approaching, his bigness, hands in his pockets. He was smiling when she turned around, his stupid Solas smile, and she smiled, too, because she couldn’t help it. When he was close enough to touch her, he put a piece of hair behind her ear, a familiar gesture, and then he sealed his hand back into his pocket, disciplined. “You look so different without your make-up.”

She blushed. “You found me.”

“I always find you. It was once my job to know where you were at all times.”

“Not anymore, Solas.”

“I know that.”

Time, lapsing.

“Well, in that case,” she said, tossing the hair off her shoulders like it was 8,000 years before. Much longer than she remembered. “You were hard asleep when I last saw you. Snoring.”

He smirked. “I do not snore.”

“Perhaps not tonight. But once, when you first moved in here, you had a cold, and you snored.”

“I have never once had a cold.”

“Yes, you did,” she said, happy. She did not even smoke anymore. The cigarette was burning down to the filter, so she just flicked it to the floor and made it disappear. “When you first came here. You had a cold, because you just never slept. You got sick. Don’t you remember? You were nineteen, and you never slept, and you got sick. And then you finally slept—in your mother’s garden for the humidity, and you snored.”

He studied her, the stars deep beneath his skin, deep in his bones where they filled him with a great, white light. She could see it now, so clearly, without her make-up. “You’re right,” he said. “I forgot.”

“No you didn’t,” she said. “It was just a very long time ago.”

He stared hard into her like he was collecting the pieces, but she knew that it was just him—memorizing, or trying to memorize what was. The lights flickered overhead, and it never did happen. Time, lapsing. Everything changed. They glanced up to the chandeliers, their dancing candles, and sighed into these quiet, domestic magics as the things that had once defined them but had fallen to the ages, just like their love.

“These old halls,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” said Mythal. She closed up, like an old hope chest with a rusted lock. She became pensive.

“For what?” said Solas.

“Being here. I knew you’d sense me and that you'd come, but it was not a summons. I promise. But now, I need to know. Who dimmed the bloody chandeliers, Solas?” She shook her head, almost crying. “It’s like a joke. That is love, is it not? Like a melancholy joke. Comedy never ages well.”

“All of it matters,” he said. “Every last moment. And Sene knows that I am here.”

Mythal nodded, looked away. “Good.”

“Love dies,” he said. “It can be reborn, Mythal.”

“So says you,” she said, her arms wrapped around her small body. She was smiling, but it was feeble, a show. Her eyes were glassy. “You found yours. Younger, prettier. Someone who will expose her knees to the sunlight, sweat, and never piss anybody off.”

“You’re being dramatic,” said Solas. “You know that you’re pretty. You just want me to tell you, which is old news. And anyway, Sene pisses people off all the time.”

“Maybe,” she said, her eyes cast to the marble floor.

“She pisses you off,” said Solas, smirking. “You piss her off, too. Like fire and ice.”

The lights flickered again, overhead. Mythal looked to see.

“The show’s about to start,” she said. She looked at him then. She was a real person. She just never wanted him to know. She didn’t have the control over the Fade she once did. She never forgot, but it wasn’t enough to call him to her, not like she’d used to do. Send birds flapping into his peripheral vision. _Fen’Harel,_ she would whisper in her voice. _I’m waiting in the bedroom._ She would tease him. He, however, knew every corner and obstacle of this fuck-forsaken place, even now. He could have easily ignored her there. He came, because he cared. “I’ll survive, vhenan,” she said.

“I know,” said Solas, hands in his pockets still. There was a flower in his collar, and he smelled good, clean. “I have faith in you.”

Sometimes she still felt buried in that valley in the mountains far away where the purple flowers grew straight out of the snow. She wondered if that sort of weeping ever really left a man. It had been so bad for him. She’d seen it from the Fade, with her ghost eyes. It made her feel so sad, but she could not do anything about it. Sometimes she still loved him, but she knew now more than anything that it was just like the flowers growing out of the snow, impossible, and her love for him was just an echo through the hallways of the blue fortress that was her heart. Had any of it ever been real?

“You were always the only one who thought I could be better,” she said. “You and your mother.”

“There will be others,” said Solas. “If that is what you want. You just have to go to them. You can’t look back. Trust me, Mythal. Speed, at least at first, is the answer.”

“Yes,” said Mythal, laughing to herself, thinking about Lea. “Perhaps I’ll find a nice dishwasher?”

Solas laughed at this, shook his head. He adjusted the cuff links in his sleeves—pretty white stones that reminded her of winter.

She became remorseful then, at their levity. She wanted to be honest.

“I’m sorry I cannot come to your wedding,” she said, staring at him. “I am happy for you.”

He glanced up from his sleeves, focused. He nodded, once, as the words cut right through. “It’s all right,” he said, almost like a question. “I understand. I did not expect you to come.”

“I was invited,” she said. "One should attend an event if they are invited. It is only proper."

“This isn't finishing school, Mythal. People are complicated. We invited you, because you are a friend to us, and you’ve helped us in ways for which we will never be able to truly thank you. But I never thought you would come, and that is not a bad thing. I just know you. Sene was optimistic, but she is always optimistic.”

“I wish I was so optimistic,” said Mythal, wiping the tears from her cheek, sucking it all back like she’d been taught to do many years before. “I wish that I was not weak.”

“You’re only as weak as you allow yourself to be, Mythal,” said Solas. “That has always been true, and you know it.”

He smiled then, low and settled. He took his right hand out of his pocket, and he took hers. He squeezed it, once, as she looked down at their fingers touching, and then he let go and put his hand back in his pocket and that was the end.

“Thank you, Mythal,” he said, his eyes so gray.

“You’re welcome, Solas,” she said.

And then he nodded, low, and turned around and walked away. His shoes were loud on the marble floor.

 

She awoke in the linen sheets of a great big brass bed at the Hawke estate in Kirkwall. It had been raining the night before, but the sun was out this morning, drying the leaves in the trees and the green grass of the yard, and a little red bird was singing from the railings of the fire escape. The room where she slept seemed made entirely of curtains. Lea had given Hawke some decorating advice, and much of it involved very light, ethereal curtains. _Every man needs a bit of soft in his domicile, love,_ she said to him, scrubbing her hand through his brand new season’s beard. _Men most of all, in fact. Especially men like you._

 _Handsome men?_ said Hawke, smirking.

 _Hard men,_ she said, as she was impossible to shake. And she looked at Fenris then, and she assessed him and Mythal remembered now how Lea seemed, and it was strange, like she did not quite know how to read him. He was tongue-tied in his heart. A little like Solas, but deeper. A little older. A little meaner and kicked like a dog. All his whimpering ignored and left out to dry for so long, so he no longer whimpered. He kept it all inside, like holding your breath till your face turns blue, and when he could not hold it back anymore, he turned to the bottle. _What do you say, Fenris?_ she said, full of hope, hands on her hips. She wore a yellow housedress that day. _You know I haven’t heard a name like yours since I was a girl._

He half-blushed. It was shocking. He was sitting in the window seat with the newspaper in his lap. He put the newspaper up to hide his cheeks. _I like the curtains,_ he said. _They remind me of summer._

 _It is summer, Fen,_ said Hawke, holding a potted plant now, fashioning it atop a shelf in the airy corner.

 _But it is not always summer, Garrett,_ said Fenris.

 _Wise words,_ said Lea, and then she looked at Mythal, and the room felt very warm. She said, _Come on, love._ _Let’s leave these men to their jollies and go to the pub._

Now, the house was empty. Hawke and Fenris had left for Crestwood the week before, Lea traveling along with them. Today was the big day: the wedding of the Tall Red Elf and her Warrior. It would be the social event of the season. Everybody who was anybody was going to be there. In all her life, Mythal had never once missed the social event of the season. In fact, it was usually her event—the social event of the season. It was usually in her honor. But she was no longer a woman to honor, and in fact, she was just a woman. So she put on some soft clothes—a blue dress she had sewed herself with her elegant hand, and she tied her hair into a deft, dancer’s knot at the back of her head. She put on her rouge, and her mascara. She looked in the mirror, and she did not dislike what she saw. She did not dislike it, and she tried to make this really count. When you’re a woman, it’s easy not to make it count, to go on thinking that you’re only pretty because a man tells you so. A big, handsome man especially. Like Solas. But I am here to tell you right now, with all my eggs in one basket that that’s a bunch of shit. It’s a bunch of total shit. So put on your rouge, and look in the mirror. You are pretty. You are doing just fine. 

Mythal was going out.

           

_2 - Lemons, or something else?_

The night before she was wed to Marin, Leanathy dreamed of foxes. There were five of them. The first was dead, its body ripped in half, and there was snow melting into the mud of their boxy backyard with the dark winter grasses, and blood in the snow, and the sun high overhead. This seemed very bad. Parts of it seemed to be eaten. She looked around for her baby. She had left it alone with her sister for five minutes while she went inside to take the pie out of the oven, but now she could not see the baby. Her sister was trying to grow tropical flowers from the cold, hard earth and had become distracted, and now the baby was out of sight.

“Vune,” said Lea. _“Vune._ ”

“What?” Vune was annoyed, holding a papaya in her hand like a little skull. The baby had not been her responsibility, after all.

“I’ll look,” said Lea.

She went outside with her boots on. She was a sensible girl, and it was very cold. She looked around, but she could not see the baby. Two more foxes came. One climbed over the low, heavy fence, and another crawled out from under the porch. This one bared its teeth, so she scared it away with the shovel. She picked up the garden table, but the baby was not under there. She checked underneath the porch, where the fox had come from, but it was not there either. She looked across the yard where the swallows swooped and dive-bombed from the rafters of the barn. She didn’t remember there being a barn. She called out for the baby, nothing.

The last two foxes, she could see only in her peripheral vision, stalking through the weeds. They were long, feral creatures, strong and sinewy. She looked at the barn, and she thought the baby must be there. But the door was darkened, and it looked like no one had been in that barn for a very long time. She thought there must be rusty saws and things and it was no place for a baby. She went to see.

But inside, it was just Marin. No baby, no foxes. He was building a birdhouse by the light of one of his butterflies, using his careful carpentry. He looked up at her, and he smiled warmly. “Good morning, vhenan,” he said. “How are you today?”

She suddenly became very panicked. “I cannot find the baby,” she said, wrapping her arms around her body. “Have you seen the baby anywhere?”

But this only made him smile. He knew something she didn’t. He always knew something she didn’t. She would worry and fret, while he would pet her and tell her it was okay. Her magic was so much stronger than his, but her spine was brittle. He seemed made of such strong, important stuff. Ancient metals, impervious. In the dream, he had symbols tattooed on his forearms and on his neck. The symbols seemed to hum to the sounds of the locomotives and the steam engines in the big city, and the castles that floated high overhead. They were important symbols that held all the answers to all of time and the world. He set down his tools, and he took her into his arms.

“You have the baby, vhenan,” he said. He set his hand on her heavy, round stomach. She hadn’t noticed this before. It seemed to be weighing her down now. It was filled with a pressure, a full feeling, like she had to pee. She looked down, and she put her hands on his. His hands were rough and big as stars. The baby was there, inside of her. “See?”

She woke up.

When she turned over on their ramshackle mattress that morning, the morning of their wedding, she saw him, again. He was wide awake beside her in the morning light, his nose buried in his blueprints, sketching something out with a piece of chalk. She knew it was a dream then, that it was the not the Fade. Only a dream. She had never been much good for navigating the Fade. She could get there and feel her way about, but it was big and ceaseless, and she would lose her nerve. She was no dice as a Dreamer. But Marin was a good guide. He feared nothing. He dreamed for the sport of it. The spirits all knew him by name, only they spoke in literal terms that sort of spooked her. _House Man._ That is what they called him. The House Man. Was this weird, or was it simply correct? Spirits could not always be trusted, but there were no barbarians among them. Mostly they liked to press against you with their tricks and jokes. They liked trades. Sometimes, they’d pop over into the world and ask for a smoke.

She reached for him.

He set down the crinkly parchment. He looked at her in familiar fashion. He put a piece of black hair behind her ear. “Good morning, vhenan,” he said. He got back under the covers, wrapped his body around hers. His was a big warmth. “Did you sleep well?”

She nodded, smiling big and toothy, feeling his breath on her neck. She had already forgotten the foxes.

“Are you ready for today?”

“Yes,” she said, nuzzling. “I am.”

He smoothed his big hands over her stomach. It was not as big and round as it had been in the dream. It was not even a little bump yet. After all that, she was just three months along.

They had told her parents the month before, hoping the news would change their hearts. It had been an accident, but a happy one. They disowned her anyway. They wanted nothing to do with her or her rural trash husband, and the cosmic mistake growing inside her body. _This is a tragedy._ That’s what they had said. They called her pregnancy a tragedy. They did not even let her inside the castle to get her things. She had to make new things. She had to sew new clothes and grow new flowers from new pots, and Marin built all their furniture in their first house where they lived on the other side of the train yard. They lived so close to the city in those days, you could feel its electricity in your cells. They couldn’t afford to live inside the Great Gate—but they didn’t want to anyway. Too many people—a hive. He’d built them the most beautiful furniture he knew how to build. Chairs and a new bed and a swing for the porch painted blue. Their dining room table was a thing of geometric genius—that’s what Lea thought. He poured himself into his carpentry. That is how his magic worked, like an art.

He stayed positive through the entire ordeal with her family. He was a good man with a strong, impervious soul, though it was hard on him, at times. She could see it, wearing into him in the evenings when they would talk of it. He would get so angry. Not about what they’d said about him, or the money. He did not care what they thought of him, or the money. But how they treated her, and how they seemed to place such little value on life and blood ties, their grandchild—that part made him very angry. He kept it inside as best he could, made his peace with the way things were. He was a stoic man, as his son would someday grow up to be—in their biology, I suppose—but Lea knew it was there.

In many ways she always had hated her parents, but after they cut her off for good, it still hurt. It was like a death in the family. A couple of times, her sister tried to contact her, but it was too hard, and they lost touch. Why couldn’t they be better people? She didn’t care about being poor, or being alone. She cared that they hated him so much, and they hated her and their unborn child by proxy of hating him, and they didn’t even know him. He had built the fucking belfry in their castle, and they loved that belfry, but they hated him. They would sit in their beautiful belfry and listen to the bells and the birds nesting overhead, and they would hate him. They wouldn’t even give him a chance. She wondered often how she could be made of them, such mean people. And she wondered, too, what they would do now, after purging their oldest child of the family means and fortune. Would Vune inherit their house and their assets—their clandestine armies in the palace cellars and all of their influence inside the Great Gate of the city? What would become of them? She did not know. In truth, her mind sometimes worked like a prophecy, and she saw too much. But she did not want to know. It felt bad, what was coming for them—like a pecking in her gut.

She wore a long white dress to her wedding, thin straps with an empire waist. The ship captain was friendly. His name was Arla. He knew Marin through his father who had worked as a deckhand in his youth. It was just them and a few passers-by that the ship captain had asked to watch and then sign the witness papers. They looked on, a man and a woman who did not seem to know each other—perfect strangers—in idle bliss—and it would be a moment they would talk of for years to come. That time they’d been corralled by a ship captain and asked to witness a wedding between two young lovers in the Backwater by the Sea. Lea was eighteen. Marin was twenty.

 _May a great wind carry you through your days,_ said the ship captain as Lea and Marin held hands. The tide was pulling into shore not ten feet out. The salty breeze blew her dress around. Marin looked right at her, serious and focused and young and filled with conviction as the captain spoke. He had chosen her, and she had chosen him. The moment was sacred. _To have and to hold, for better and for worse. Mar lath vir sule’din._

 

For two months after the wedding, Marin’s workshop walls were covered in mathematical formulas as he planned their treehouse. He would furrow his brow as he scribbled them in chalk, and sometimes he would stay up all night, because he had to. He worked during the day for his father, as an engineer in Arlathan, and then he would come home, and he would plan, and then once the planning was done, he would build. They had to move to the Weathers—in a rented room over a tavern for about a month while he built. He would be gone before she woke up, and she would take a long walk in her pregnant body to the sight of the treehouse, just to bring him a pitcher of ice water and a sandwich in a brown paper bag. It was certainly a little life that they a cultivated there. Everybody at the tavern knew her name. The bar mistress would make her excellent teas in the morning, and little concoctions to help with her pregnancy pains. Marin would come home and drink one clean glass of whiskey, and they would eat their dinner at the table, by the fire. Lea, meanwhile, grew her magic. She was a timid girl in many respects after being purged from her family and her means, but when she let go of all that, she could be funny and rambunctious. She began to make ice, and she would sell it to the tavern, and with their iced drinks, they became the most popular tavern in all the Weathers. When Marin finally finished their treehouse, they would be sad to see her go.

The treehouse was small and simple but beautiful and, like Marin, seemingly impervious to the cold and the heartaches of living. They moved in, and three months after that, Solas was born. Within a year, they saved up enough so that Marin could build them a real house. A bigger house—nearby, but on a big plot of land, and that house would have sturdy walls and a sturdy roof that only leaked when the rain got really heavy. It was not a treehouse, which floated above the ground in romantic fashion—it was something permanent, with bones inside it. They sold that treehouse, and they left forever, and Marin inherited a partnership with his father, and he began to get bigger jobs in the city. When he was only twenty-two, he designed and built a belfry for an aristocrat named Eir’melan, and he did many smaller jobs for him as well which earned him a lot of respect in the community. These jobs included restoring the library and renovating the aviary of the castle and building a collection of artisanal dollhouses for Eir’melan’s only daughter, Mythal. For these jobs, Marin was paid a lot of money, and his loyalty to Eir’melan and his family would one day culminate in his service as a designer and builder of barracks and robust field camps for Eir’melan’s many armies. For this, Marin was paid even more money, much of which he used to pay off the house, and the rest he used to pay off other debts he’d accrued in building his own business, and the rest he put away for a rainy day. As a child, Solas was quiet but intense, and he grew lively with the years. Marin would sit with him in the kitchen and write math problems down on a piece of paper. Solas would stare at them and solve them quickly, and then he would write his own math problems, and together, they would trade and share in their communal genius. Ghilan’nain, the local girl whose family owned one of the bigger houses in the Weathers would ride her bike down the lane and spend her days here, chasing after Solas, who had grown to depend on her and her constant presence in his life. Lea would never forget the pink ribbons on her handlebars or the blue ribbons in her hair, and how, even as a very young child, she was remarkably sweet, but she seemed worried that the world would be yanked out from beneath her—the fabric of her reality too thin. Lea could relate to this, and she would relate to it more and more as the years flew past.

Lea planted a garden. In her garden, she grew plants that the world had never seen. When the neighbors would walk by, sometimes they’d ask her— _What_ are _those berries, Leanathy?_ and _Are those lemons, or something else?_ She had no answers. She only had her knowing smirk. She never really understood her magic and its gravity until she was conscripted by Mythal. And even still, she did not really begin to use it properly until she died and was born again.

For nine years after their wedding, Marin and Lea lived in relative marital and domestic bliss with their son and their psychotic cat and their pretty furniture and their garden, the neighbor girl who loved them, and the curious passers-by who found them nothing short of unique. Then, the rain came. Bad things happened. She died, diseased by her own grief, but she came back. Why did she come back? And why did she come back when she did? Perhaps it was the pull of nature—that knowing ease that it would all be okay. Solas had found a place in the world, and she along with him. She could not see the future, but she could see the present very well, and sometimes, that is enough.

And now, almost nine thousand years later, she waited as her son, Solas, a man now, so much like his father and yet so different at times it was a pleasant reminder of the way that children evolve—was standing with his big hands clasped in front of him at his very own wedding, very tall and handsome at the altar, wearing a pale cream shirt and suspenders and a boutonniere crafted by her own magical hand, waiting for his bride, a tall girl who, Lea had surmised, could be a little bit of a spazz, but she was pretty, and she loved Solas enough to make him face down his own bullshit, and best of all, she knew what she wanted, and a person who knows what they want is a rarity, regardless of their age or status or who they were in their heart. It is true that Lea would have loved any woman that Solas had chosen to marry. That her son had chosen to marry at all made her weep with joy at the possibility that he would no longer be alone. She was glad that it was Sene, but more than anything, she was just glad. She sat in the front row of many long rows, and she wore her wicker hat with the pink ribbon—a gift from Morrigan and the odd spirit child, Cole—and she clutched a thin shawl of green silk chiffon around her shoulders, and she watched her son get married, and her widow’s tears were warm on her cheeks, but she was glad.

All of these things at once like a great big halo around the world, sucking them all closer to the singularity that is the place where joy meets truth. In this, this singularity, that is where she would be for all time—Leanathy. The wolf’s mother.

 

  _3 - Ritual of the Sun_

“We are gathered here today to celebrate, and to sanctify the blessed union of Isene and Solas. My name is Deshanna Lavellan. I am the Keeper of Clan Lavellan and the patriarch of the Lavellan family, and it is therefore my duty and my pleasure to conduct our proceedings today.”

Sene and Solas were married quietly beneath a trellised archway in their front yard. When asked, at one point, why they chose not to marry at the Lavellan farm, they answered simply that they wanted the day to be their own—their own burden, and their own success, and also that they did not want to be hundreds of miles away from their country home on their wedding night. They wanted to be safe and tucked away in their own bed sheets, beneath their own corner of the moon. They wanted to wake up and smell the air of Crestwood.

It was a hot day. The archway was wide enough to cover the both of them and guard them from the sun, and now that the music had stopped you could hear the insects in the trees, rubbing their wings together, buzzing off into the blue sky. The breeze was coming in, and Solas tucked one red curl behind Sene’s ear. Her hair was so wild, and on that day it wanted out of those braids more than anything. He studied their delicate hold, and the reds and yellows of the golden flyaways around her temples. Her cheeks were red. Her freckles brown in the sun.

Deshanna held his leather folder under his arm. He was a gifted public speaker and seemed to have no need for a script. He smiled routinely and calmly as he delivered them into the rest of their lives. “Per the rites and rituals of Dalish marriage,” he continued, “it is traditional that the Keeper of the parent clan, or Keepers of two joining clans, conduct and oversee the ceremony, a symbol of continuity in a world torn by constant change and flux. However.” He turned to Solas. “Solas is not Dalish, and so, we've had to adapt.” He addressed the congregation once more in the wide open air with his chin high. “Adaptation, as we all know, is paramount to survival for any species. Given his remarkable history, it has become increasingly clear to me over the past year as I've gotten to know him, that Solas is no stranger to the concept. It is no secret to anyone here, nor to society at large at this point, given his continued political, diplomatic, and heroic military importance on the continent of Thedas, that Solas is an ancient elf. His circumstances are at once unique and mundane as he stands here today, a man seeking marriage and a place in the ever-turning circle of life as we know it. Note that he does not walk alone in his tradition. His mother, Leanathy joins us on this day, as well as his oldest friend and confidant Abelas, all of whom represent the elven people in a new and unfounded capacity. We are one. It is, first and foremost, my honor to declare that Clan Lavellan welcomes Solas, our ancestor and newest member of the family, as well as a great protector and bearer of the burdens of truth and harmony, and blesses his union with our daughter of the hunt, Isene—and will accept and defend him as one of our own for the rest of his days.”

He placed his hand on Solas’s shoulder then as to address him directly with his seriousness. Solas straightened up in response—perfect courage and stoicism, meeting his eyes, and nodded in solidarity. But if you were Sene—and only if you were Sene, and maybe Lea, and maybe Mythal in another life, but in truth, it was only Sene—If you were Sene, you could see it, right there, in his face. In his eyes like little gray lights. The gratitude, and the feelings, but they weren’t made of colors or dreams or memories. They were like arrows, and pulling them out one by one. That was just who he was. She had pulled arrows out of men before. She had pulled arrows out of herself before. The pain is enormous but the relief is even bigger. She squeezed his hand, and he looked at her, almost surprised. As a man, he did not look fearful, but no man is fearless, not even Solas, and she just wanted him to know that it was okay—it was right. And he broke a little—another thing that only Sene could see, and he smiled and put that red curl behind her ear once more. There was a breeze and the same piece kept coming loose. It didn’t bother her, but she knew he’d tuck it back for her anyway.

Sera, Morrigan, Cassandra, Josephine, and Leliana stood in a line by Sene’s side. All of them in faded, different colored dresses that went down past their feet—silks and cottons. Natural faces, proud bodies and minds. Solas had never seen them dressed up like this all at once—their bare shoulders as they held flowers and watched Sene as if to nurture her, lovingly, through the process. He committed the picture to his memory. He did not want to forget it. Sera was tearful as she looked on, fierce and earnest and tall as hell. Her dress was a kind of burnt red, and she had a yellow lily in her hair. He caught her eye, and she smiled, annoyed, through her crying and wiped her cheeks on the back of her hand, and she whispered, _Fuck off, elven man._ He laughed a little—just to himself. Then he looked at Sene. She was looking at Deshanna and listening to his words. She had no nerves that day, not anymore. The previous week, she’d been terrified that it might rain. There had been rain in the atmosphere, soaking the garden and keeping the sky so gray, it put her into a state of strange and bridal frenzy. He found her standing at the window one morning, up even earlier than she usually was, chewing her nails off and digging her thumbs into her palms, just staring at the rain. That afternoon, when he finished with some of his work in the shed, he came back inside looking for her, but she was in the garden. She stood beside the rose bushes, holding her hand out and staring up at the sky.

 _Vhenan?_ he called. He held a jacket up over his head, and he rushed out of the house to meet her in the yard.

She just sighed.

 _What are you doing out here?_ he said. He touched her hair, gently. It was soaked and heavy as a mop.

 _It’s still raining_ , she said.

_I am aware of that. Come inside._

_I can’t,_ she said.

_Why not?_

She blinked up at him. The raindrops were slow but fat. They slid from her lashes to her cheeks. She had been crying, and finally, he figured it out. _Is this about the wedding?_

 _It’s in less than a week,_ she said.

He sighed, relieved somehow that this was it, this was their huge massive drama of the day. _Sene, the rain will clear._

 _No it won’t_ , she said.

This was silly. _Come on._ He tugged her at the waist, pulling her into him. He kissed her on the head and pressed his nose into her cold, magic hair. He still held the jacket overhead. A makeshift umbrella, protecting them both. _We will get married,_ he said to her, quiet. _I shall make it happen. Somehow, Isene. I will shake the heavens till they dry. If I must._ She was just staring at him. But then she laughed.

Sometimes, it was all just a joke. Then she looked out, deep past the hills and to the very end of their chilly horizon. The terrain of Crestwood was heavy and amber in the rain. Whole swathes of purple flowers, like kites downed from the storm.

 _You’re serious?_ she said. _At least a little?_

He smirked.

Of course, he wasn’t really serious. Or, maybe a little. But in truth, he had no idea how to stop the rain. Even if he wanted to. He thought there was probably a mage somewhere, in some universe who could fuck with the weather, but it wasn’t him. He could only fuck with the stars, and so much of that old power had already gone back to them anyway. He’d felt it leaving his bones with a natural ease, leaving him comfortable in the skin of the man he was when he first met her. But none of it mattered. Sene knew that it didn't matter, and he knew that she did, it was just that she needed to be reassured. Rain was just a stupid circumstance. They had weathered far worse circumstances than rain. And in any case, it stopped raining that very night, and Solas gave her a knowing,  _I-told-you-so_ look in their bed the next morning as the sun came pouring through their curtains. She just shoved him in the shoulder once, playfully, and then she got up to go brush her hair.

Now.

She stood right there, in front of him, and it was their wedding, and it was not raining, and he was in mortal awe, but his mind was quiet. Everything was very quiet for Solas. She was wearing a blue bracelet he had never seen before. The little latch had got caught in the silk of her dress. He liked the bracelet, and he liked idea that she had a bracelet that he had never seen. It was like a surprise, a piece of her he didn’t know, and that was a good thing. Anyway, he noticed before she did, that the latch had caught in the silk, and he reached gently to remove the snag. He was good at this, the clockmaker’s son.

“Fuck,” said Sene as she realized, trying to smooth her hands over her dress. She smiled at him, mortified, and the crowd laughed, and so she swore again and then covered her mouth and swore again, and then she looked at Deshanna. “Fuck,” she said, again. “I’m so sorry.”

But she was like a piece of grass, just blowing around in the wind, and Solas was laughing now, and Deshanna was an old charmer. Somewhere back at the house, the wind chimes had gone off. The breeze came. All the bridesmaids grabbed hold of their dresses. “Isene,” he said. “It’s your day.”

“And?”

“Swear however much you'd like.”

“Oh.” She smiled and blushed and the crowd was a colorful sea of faces and little murmurs and laughing between them. Deshanna watched as Sene and Solas regrouped together, and how Solas met her halfway in these small spaces between big moments, as if that is the way they lived their lives together every day.

In truth, and this applies to this moment and all others, Keeper Deshanna knew that he never once would have cared about the identity of the man Sene had brought home and chosen to marry. The fact that it was a man as impossible and as strong as Solas did not surprise him, but it was of passing importance. Her happiness was all he cared about. He found Fisara in the crowd then, sitting in the first row, turning the wedding ring around her long ring finger, her dark hair with the silver at the roots tied into a long braid over her shoulder. She smiled at him when she caught his eye, but very quiet so as not to distract. She was his second wife. His first had gone to cancer when she was only forty-four, and he spent almost eight years alone, thinking about what he could have done to save her. But then he went to the marketplace in Wycome to meet with the Keeper of a local clan of barrel-makers, and Fisara was there with him, and she had a robust way about her heart as she spoke of barrels and wood-working, and she was loud and passionate, and the way she looked at him made him feel very young and like a simple, pure sort of man. She was not intimidated by him, or by his Lavellans, and instead, she thought it was interesting that he was a Keeper and yet not a mage, as her Keeper was a mage and even her dead husband had been a mage. He had died tragically while delivering a shipment of barrels to another clan of elves in Kirkwall, and it was this event, in fact, that had lead their Keeper to seek protection under the Lavellan umbrella in the first place. They knew there would be no better way to thrive as coopers than in the protected company of rich distillers. It is the way of the world. Deshanna and Fisara were married about five years later. It took them almost no time to take a liking to each other but a long time to fully pry open their hearts as so much had been taken from them in previous lives. But Fisara liked the Lavellan sensibility, and she fit into it well, and she made it her own, because she knew who she was even during life's darkest moments. It was because of all this, in many ways, that Deshanna related to Solas most. Though he knew there could be no real comparison between them and the things they'd seen, it was all the same in the end, losing people that you love and coming back from that. Whether it was from an epic magical war 8,000 years ago, or the simple, inescapable truth of disease.

Then, there was Revasan. Rev was chewing compulsively on a wooden toothpick, fucking manic genius, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, never still, always moving, watching the ceremony with desperate focus while Rasha sat, soft and contained by his side, her hand stretched out on his wide back. She was not the sort of women who cried. That had gone out of her a long time back, Deshanna knew that well, with the death of her family, and now, she just sort of went away when the emotions kicked in too fast. Deshanna could see her fighting it, fighting to feel on her daughter’s wedding day. But once upon a time at a family dinner in the past, she explained to Deshanna what it felt like—what it felt like to feel, how her feelings were a long tunnel then went down to a deep well and it was hard to go down just a little ways without tumbling fast to the bottom and drowning, and that was why she instinctively stopped herself. He admired her for her honesty on that day. Now, Revasan put his hand on her knee, because he knew better than anyone her compulsions, and it was more than words, and he leaned back and, suddenly calm and collected, he whispered something into her ear. She smiled, blushed, looking just like Sene, and put her head on his shoulder and together they sat and continued to watch their daughter get married. Deshanna was proud of this. He had married them, too, after all. Twenty-two years before when they were only eighteen.

In due time, he read Sene and Solas the marriage rites. The ceremony was meant to be small and sweet. They took their vows as they held hands, and Sene also held Sera’s hand, and Solas held Dorian’s, and everybody held hands, and then Terys came along with a long yellow ribbon made of satin, and he gave one end to Cullen, and then he went across and the other end to Leliana, and now the bride and groom and the Best Man and the Maid of Honor and all of the bridesmaids and groomsmen were connected by hands or by way of the yellow ribbon. It was an old Dalish ritual, symbolic of the sun, a great circle, as two lives came together, and that included all of their friendships and all of the past and the future, and how it all came back around forever, and there are never just people in love, but those around them who hold them up through thick and thin, their backbone and their community of warmth. Sene said, _Ara dir’vhen’an,_ and Solas said, _Ara dir'vhen'an,_ and Deshanna accepted this, simply. Terys came back, and he took the ribbon, and everybody let go and all the electricity went out of their hands and into the air.

“In my power as Keeper of Clan Lavellan,” said Deshanna now, hands clasped in front of him and smiling in his wise, silver beard, “and by all rites of Dalish marriage and the law of the Kingdom of Ferelden, I hereby pronounce you to be husband and wife.” He closed his eyes and bowed his head. So did Sene and Solas. In their gentle minds, the world was dark. In this, their final solemn moment, Deshanna placed one hand on the back of Sene’s neck, and the other on the back of Solas’s neck, and deep in his heart he felt their union. “May a great wind carry you through your days,” he said, reverent. “ _Mar lath vir sule’din_.” They opened their eyes, and the world appeared. Simple. The colors and the shapes and the faces, the joy, the sadness—it was all simple.

“Solas, You may kiss your bride.”

 

_4 - "The hero is the champion of things becoming, not of things become, because he is."_

Sometime later, after all the comers had gone and the people had left the party—the Lavellans, entertaining Lea and Morrigan and Kieran, back in their fancy aravels, parked at the fanciest edge of the property, Sera and Dorian and all of the Inquisition friends, _including_ Divine Victoria, shooting whiskey by the light of enchanted candles at the Tavern in the village, Abelas and El and the quaint Druana clan all on their way back to the Hinterlands—all that remained were empty bottles and colorful ribbons and blue lanterns hanging in the garden, and all the flowers in the earth and the wind in the trees, and Sene and Solas, alone at last, grabbed what was left of the champagne and climbed the trellis up to the roof.

“I can’t believe I’m not more drunk,” said Sene as Solas gave her a boost.

“I think my tolerance has gone numb, to be honest,” said Solas. It made her laugh.

Once they got up there, they sat with their tall knees up and Sene leaned into him and looked at the simple ring on her finger. It was yellow gold, and it was special, because Thom had smithed it, and his as well, and it turned out he was something of a goldsmith, and that was enchanting. There were three stones in Sene’s ring, very modest, one red and two pink. _Stones of summer_ , Solas had called them. His was like hers, but it had no stones. Just a simple piece of gold on his left hand. He was not much for jewelry, but it looked good on him.

Solas took a long drink of the champagne, pulling straight from the bottle. He handed it to her, and she drank as well, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. The terrain of Crestwood was long and moonlit in front of them. You couldn’t really see any colors. The air smelled a little like bonfires.

“So, what do you think of my parents’ _gift_?” said Sene, a little attitude in her voice. She pressed her thumb to the middle of her palm.

Solas took her hand and closed it into his so that she’d stop. “It’s very generous,” he said.

For their wedding, the Lavellan Clan had bestowed upon Sene and Solas thirteen acres of their very own fertile wine country up in the family compound. Gave them the deed and everything. The bottle they drank from that night had been grown from said family soil. It was a gift of welcome as much as anything else, but also a very expensive, very obvious bargaining chip. Sene sighed.

“They want us to come visit,” said Sene. “All then time. That’s what it means. It’s like a symbol.”

“Of course it is,” he said. “But who cares? Your farm is a pretty place, and this is a small price to pay.”

“It’s a little manipulative.”

“It’s extremely manipulative,” he said. “But the thing I like about your parents and Deshanna is that their particular brand of manipulation is all out there on the surface. It’s wide open. Everybody is in on the strategy, including us. It would be worse if they were passive aggressive about it. There are far less favorable situations.” He handed her the bottle. “Trust me, vhenan.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She smiled. She knew that he was right. She took another long drink. She nudged him in the shoulder. He nudged her back. Starlight fell down upon them like rain. 

Sene thought about her husband then, and his whole life. She thought about his whole great big life. “Hey,” she said. She’d just thought of something.

“Yes, vhenan?”

“What were marriage rituals like before, Solas?” It was a little out of nowhere. She was still wearing her dress, but she was barefoot. The night was mild. Solas had thrown his jacket over her shoulders sometime after the sun went down, but she didn’t have it anymore. He wondered where it might be. “I can’t believe we never talked about it.”

“Weddings were huge affairs in Arlathan,” said Solas. “Any chance to display one’s wealth. Ghilan’nain’s mother was a wedding planner. When we were teenagers, Ghil used to drag me to her mother’s weddings all the time. We would just sit there and make fun of everyone in their bird hats.”

“Are you serious?”

“Indeed.”

Sene smiled. “What the fuck are _bird_ hats?”

“Just hats shaped like birds.”

“Oh.”

“Once, we were at a wedding at a golf course.”

“A what?”

“It’s kind of an old game—but they still play it in Orlais. You don’t know it?”

She shrugged. "Golf?"

“Anyway.” He took a long pull from the bottle. The bubbles were sharp. They burned in his chest, in a good way. “At that wedding, I accidentally lit my suit jacket on fire. Ghil’s mother was furious. She made us leave.”

“You lit it on fire?”

He nodded. “I was lighting a joint, and holding the jacket up over my head to try and block the wind. It caught. We were maybe eighteen? It was my only suit.” He looked down into the bottle then, as if it were home to all of his deepest, darkest fears, but it was just champagne. Very expensive Lavellan brand champagne. “I’m glad we kept things small,” he said, and he finished the champagne. He looked right at her. “I know you had your doubts about the rituals, Sene, but I rather liked our Dalish wedding.”

“Me, too.”

“It was a very good day.” He kissed her on the forehead, fast. He then removed his cufflinks and put them in his pocket. He rolled up his sleeves and took her hand again. He turned it over, and she held it open for him, and he drew shapes on her palm with his finger. Little frescoes that only he could see. 

Sene became dreamy as he did this. “When Bull and Dorian and Sera and Dagna come back in the morning,” she said, “we will be married.”

This made Solas laugh. “We will always be married, vhenan.”

“Yes, but there is something so immediate about tomorrow, don’t you think? Like all of a sudden, we’ll be whole new people.”

“I’m not sure,” he said, closing her hand into a fist, bringing her knuckles to his lips. “I think we’ll be exactly the same.” 

“Maybe,” said Sene. She smiled and put her face into his neck. “Are you gonna make pancakes?”

He smirked. “Yes, vhenan.”

“Bull likes blueberries.”

“Yes, I know that he likes blueberries. I am the one who first made him blueberry pancakes.”

“And who taught you to make blueberry pancakes? Your mother?”

“Actually, it was your father.”

She rolled her eyes. “We should all go swimming,” she said, a thousand miles per hour. “In the lake, tomorrow. It’ll get hot, probably, in the day. Like it was today. Who knows when they’ll be back in town to visit?”

He just sighed, and he smiled. “That sounds good, vhenan.”

Their need for each other's bodies was strong, but it was filled with patience. Sene and Solas were linked together and tired and ready for bedsheets where they sat on the roof. The world was all black and white in front of them. They remained very still together as they listened to the crickets.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Elvhen Translations:
> 
>  _"Mar lath vir sule'din."_ \- "Your love shall persevere."  
>  _"Ara dir'vhen'an."_ \- "I promise."/"I do."
> 
> Author's note: Title of section four is quoted from the Return section of Joseph Campbell's _The Hero with a Thousand Faces_. The Ojibwe saying this chapter uses as an epigraph is also featured mysteriously in the first two episodes of _The Sopranos_ , season six. That's where I first encountered it. Its significance is so treasured, it haunts me every day. -gala


	64. Awaken

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I wanna hold the hand inside you.
> 
> -[Mazzy Star](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ9E0mC9Cwk)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Dear Reader,_
> 
> _If you look closely, you will see that this chapter has some hyperlinks in small places. You must look closely to find them. They will take you back to chapters gone by, important moments that I revisited as I wrote the end. You do not need to follow these links to appreciate the chapter by any means, but you can, if you feel like looking back or experiencing the greater emotional significance of these moments in how I view them. The final link is the most important, to me. I will let you figure out why, if you choose to do so. This is the final chapter of The Dead Season._
> 
> _-Gala_

She was simple and tall, and she had always liked the snow. It was a remedy. That morning, she woke up early in their big, blue bed, and she went to the window. Solas was already standing there. It was unusual, for him to be up before her, and yet, here they were. He pushed back the blue curtain with his wide hand, and then he leaned forward and unlatched the window at the sill, and he pushed it open, and the wind sucked in like a great vortex, swirling all around them until they felt consumed by nature and days gone by. Solas put his arm around her shoulders, and he breathed in, deep like a moment from a book or a play. Sene glanced up at him, and he glanced down at her. He smirked.

“I want coffee,” said Sene.

“Smell the frost, vhenan,” said Solas.

She took a deep breath. It was harsh and tickled her lungs. She coughed. “Ouch."

“The air is cold, vhenan. When you breathe it in too fast, it's going to shock your system."

She kissed him on the shoulder. "Shh."

They went to the kitchen then where Solas made a pot of coffee. Sene fed the cats. There were three of them now. Two had moved in since winter, strays, and the other, the smallest one who was black and named Lemon, had been a gift from Cole, and she was still a kitten. Solas put the fire on the stove and asked what Sene would like for breakfast.

“Pancakes, or pancakes?” he said. Lemon hopped up on his shoulder and made a great big meow.

“Both,” said Sene.

“Very good.”

Sene sat down at the kitchen table. She tapped her fingertips on the wood. She was restless. She went outside in her pajamas and got the paper. It was freezing, and the landscape was more brown than white, and she could see her breath and big, dark clouds on the horizon, so she came right back in. The winters of Crestwood were big and long and silver, like anvils, and Sene wondered when the big snows would come. She sat back down at the table and opened the paper to see what there was.

_Lavellan Farm and Distillery Moves into Coastlands, Nobles Question Inquisition Ties_

_Grey Warden Disappearance: Migration to Weisshaupt? Internal Conflicts Reported, no word from Inquisition_

_Joint Representatives with Divine Victoria Declare Exalted Council: What will Become of the Inquisition?_

Sene sighed.

She turned the page. The paper was fresh and some of the ink had got on her hands, but she rarely noticed this sort of thing. There was one good headline, she thought, a little one on page four, down there in the corner: _Inquisition Repairs the Belfry at Caer Bronach, Bells Sound for the First Time in a Century[.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/17724994)_ She smiled.

She looked up at Solas who was mixing the batter, chewing on a spoon. Lemon had gone away to catch mice in the shed. Sene rested her chin in her hands. “You made the papers,” she said. "See?"

He did not look away from the mixing bowl. “What is it this time?" he said. "A treatise on my homely yet chic attire? Written by Dorian, I suppose[.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/17187541)"

“No, silly.” She showed him the little article on the fourth page. “It’s about the bells.”

At this, Solas stopped what he was doing and came over to the table. He leaned against it, put one hand in Sene’s hair and picked up the paper with the other. He read the article, nodded once, and set the paper back down. “Perhaps this will convince our noble allies that the Inquisition isn’t entirely useless to them. Bells, of all features. It’s funny to me, that we should both be concerned with the sudden disappearance of Grey Wardens and yet also pack our bags, vacate Skyhold for good. What do you think, vhenan?”

“We will never vacate Skyhold,” said Sene. “Fuck that. I’ll make it a mortuary before I let any of these noble fucks get their hands on it.”

“A mortuary? Do you know what that is?”

“Whatever,” said Sene, setting down the paper with intent. “The bells are pretty, Solas. You should be proud.”

He smiled. “Thank you, vhenan. I am proud.”

"When did your dad teach you about bells, Solas?"

“He taught me very little about bells," said Solas. "Most of it I just figured out as I went. My father taught me mostly about clocks."

“Clocks?”

Solas scrunched her hair into his fist and went back to the stove. The pan was hot. One of the cats tumbled past and to the living room, its claws making scratching noises on the floor. “He was a clockmaker, part-time. He fixed them and built them, and I used to help him when I was small[.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10080623) I’ll make one for you,” he said. “Soon. I’d need to get my hands on some rare metal. I’m sure my mother can come by it. They’re old devices, Sene. They tell time.”

She got bright, lit from within. “Time?”

Solas finished the pancakes and put them on a pretty porcelain plate. They ate together at the table while the cats chased each other around from the living room to the bedroom to the guest room at the end of the hall. Solas got up to stoke the hearth, which had grown a little dim, and the house was chilly, but it was not so bad as it stood on a hefty foundation and was made of very old stones that held onto the heat in novel ways still. They had nothing to do that day. Sene wanted to go to the village, even though it was cold, and maybe have more coffee there and wait for it to snow. They also needed some groceries. Crestwood had grown in the past year, and there was a small Dalish marketplace now where small local clans would come to sell their wares and artisanal crops. It was winter, so the only crops they tended to see were root vegetables and maybe a selection of citrus from the south, and always elfroot, but there would be a booth for warm milk and hot cocoa, and she thought the café would probably be quiet and empty because of the season, and she just didn’t like being cooped up in the house. She was Sene.

So when they finished breakfast, and the easterly sun had come up to melt away the frost on the windows, Solas and Sene went outside to take a walk up the path to the village. They passed merchants and horses and children who all said hello, many of them Dalish or human or city elves, all sorts of people coming in from Lothering mostly, or from the Hinterlands or sometimes farther, stranger places like the Korcari Wilds or even Highever. Many of them were locals, and you could always tell by how they addressed the Inquisitor. _Inquisitor,_ they would say if they were from somewhere else, but if they were from Crestwood, they just called her Lady Lavellan, and the kids called her Sene. Sene wore a purple knit scarf  that Morrigan had sent from Redcliffe, and they held hands and moved in peace. They were a part of this world, and the safety and bustle that surrounded it. There were many Inquisition soldiers still on the path to Caer Bronach, and the bells rang out to toll the hour as they passed through its shadow and waved at the guards in the crows nest overhead.

Sene felt itchy and warm, even as the day was cold. She leaned into Solas, and she put her head on his shoulder. He wore a wool coat, and that made her cheeks itch even more.

“What’s the matter?” said Solas after a while, he looked down at her. He was tall and such an elegant man. He wore gloves as he put the hair behind her ear. They were almost to the town, cutting through the howling canyons[.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/19557244)

“I am just thinking,” she said. “I don’t know. I feel weird.”

"What kind of weird?"

"All funky. I don't know. It's no big deal."

“What are you thinking about?"

“Is there a way to pretend we are strangers?” she said, looking up at him. “To pretend that we don’t know anyone, and that nobody knows us?”

“I’m not sure,” said Solas. He plucked one of the pins from her red hair and set it between his teeth. She hardly even noticed, he’d been doing this for so long. “Perhaps we could pretend. But I’m not sure others would oblige. Why do you want to be strangers?”

Sene sighed. A quiet farmer rode past on a carriage. In the near distance, over toward the lake, there was a small bazaar popping up, mostly city elves hanging colorful flags, like a small celebration of the solstice. In the Winter, the Dalish celebrated Mythal, but Sene didn’t know what the city elves did. She didn’t even know what Mythal was doing, but she knew that Mythal was doing something, that she was probably in Kirkwall, because that's where she liked to spend her time these days, and so the whole thing felt strange in comparison, to know Mythal. The All-Mother, her husband's rich ex-girlfriend, drinking hard liquor in Kirkwall, talking to bartenders and wearing little dresses made of pretty fabrics that she spun on the loom and sewed up herself. Life is a mindfuck.

“In Antiva, we were strangers,” she said as they turned a corner. She spoke of their honeymoon. The village came into view in the valley below then. The smoke rising from the chimneys, the people moving around and pushing carts and carrying baskets full of grain and bread.

“That’s mostly true,” said Solas, the pin clicking around in his teeth. “But then there was that night we met Thom and Josie in that tavern on the bay. Everybody there knew you and they picked you up and carried you around the room while singing some sort of Antivan fight song.”

Sene laughed at this. “Well, I mean. That was funny.”

"Yes, it was.” He smirked.

“But that was just that one night,” she said. “Otherwise, it was just really nice.”

“You didn’t enjoy being hoisted around like a queen by drunk, Antivan dockworkers?”

“No,” said Sene. “I did. But I just mean that it was nice seeing the world as an outsider. That’s all I meant. You know?”

Solas seemed to get this. He tugged her a little closer. It was like going all the way back to the beginning again. She was both scared and full of possibilities, all at the same time.

“We were both outsiders once,” he said, seriously. “Don’t you remember, vhenan[?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/22343804)”

 

They had returned from Antiva in the late late fall with the leaves falling in big, colorful circles around the trees. All the purple flowers had turned to cottony white and their pieces blew all over the property like snow. It never got as cold in Crestwood as Skyhold or some of those other old nightmare places she could remember, but the seasons had their potency. She’d never lived in a simple house in a place where it snowed each year. Her family’s compound only saw snow every couple of years, some bad winters, but none that she, herself, could recall. Her mother always got anxious anytime the fall came. She did not like the winter. It filled her with dread. Sene's father would behave himself in these months and tend to her in ways that Sene had used to view with cynicism. He’d bring home fresh-cut dahlias from the market, all manner of gold and red. He’d name a vintage after her and present it at family dinners while trying hard not to smoke too much in the house. These were gestures she understood now as the changing of the seasons would bring little zaps and zings to her left arm, and sometimes, she’d lose the feeling in her fingers while she would fletch her arrows, and even though Solas said it felt okay inside, Sene knew that these were old feelings that were real, and some part of her feared that she would never shake them. She would only get used to them. And so she understood her mother and her winter sadness, and how she went on and how her father went along with her. It was a cycle. Before, she was a kid. She was just a kid to them and in comparison. Now, she was older. She was more like them than she would have previously hoped to acknowledge, and she saw the world in a new light, which was both too bright to look at and yet impossible to escape. She did not want to escape.

 

Upon reaching New Crestwood, Sene and Solas were immediately approached by an Inquisition scout, bearing news from Leliana at Skyhold. At first, Sene became flustered, because she assumed that it was more business to do with the Exalted Council, which she would have to attend even though she did not care to, but it turned out it was something else, something different—a report having to do with suspicious activity down the Frostback Basin, which was governed by no one and overrun with many different factions of Avaar. Sene read the full letter provided to her by the scout, who was a young dwarf named Ansa. It said that Leliana was on her way to Crestwood herself, this very moment, to visit the operation at Caer Bronach and to brief Sene and Solas entirely on the situation. The Commander would also be here, as he lived nearby, not twenty miles east on a large plot of land with Cassie—who he was now engaged to marry—and her young son William.

Ansa the scout left very soon after giving Sene the letter, disappearing into the winter cobblestone streets of New Crestwood. They stood in the marketplace, surrounded by carts and one of the carts was stacked with pumpkins[.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/21443771) There was a man selling balloons standing next to the cart but no children around to purchase one[.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/21703811) Solas was examining the letter now, and then he folded it up and put it in his pocket. He looked down at Sene and smiled, which was something she did not expect.

“What?” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. They were very suddenly alone it seemed.

“Nothing,” he said. “Adventure calls, apparently. The world’s been quiet. It’s almost exciting.”

Sene was reluctant to admit it, but she agreed. “I guess,” she said. “Then why am I so nervous?”

“Because you get nervous, vhenan. You always have.”

“Shh.”

He took her hand. They left the marketplace and went over to the café. It didn’t have a name. It was just called “the café,” and it was decorated with many different colored candles inside, like reds and pinks and blues and greens, and there was a bard playing softly on her mandolin in the corner, singing tunes of love in her high, pleasant voice. The place was mostly empty, as they expected, so they sat down at a little circle table in the back corner beneath a stained glass window with a picture of a sunflower. In the middle of the table was a single dahlia in water, and once again, Sene thought of her parents, and then she looked at Solas, and he took off his hat and rubbed his hands together and blew into them, and then he reached across the table and casually cupped her hands inside of his—dry and big and warm. They ordered more coffee from the waitress who was a pretty human girl wearing a purple apron.

“Abelas would like this place[,](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/24372702)” said Sene. “The candles are so neat.”

“He could do better, honestly.”

“Well, duh.”

They were interrupted then, by a Dalish child with straight, brown hair. She had come in out of the cold and stood at the counter and ordered a baguette. As she was waiting, she came over a little sheepishly, and Sene said hello, and Solas did, too, and then it took her a moment, but the girl introduced herself as Ellie, and she reached around to the back pocket of her cotton dress, and she took out a piece of folded parchment.

She asked if they would mind that she had drawn their picture. She said that the other children in her clan thought that she should not approach the Inquisitor. They were new to the area and migratory but looking to lay down roots, and it was not a good idea to annoy her.

“Of course you can approach the Inquisitor,” said Solas, smiling.

“I don’t bite,” said Sene. "You could never annoy me."

The girl blushed. “Aren’t you both the Inquisitor?”

“Not really,” said Solas. “Once, I pretended to be the Inquisitor, for a little while.”

“Oh,” said the girl. She seemed confused. “Why would you do that?”

“There was a job to do,” said Sene. “And I couldn’t be there to do it. He did a very good job in my place.”

“Thank you, vhenan[,](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/24946500)” said Solas. He held out his hand then, to the little girl. “Let us see what you’ve got.”

The little girl, Ellie, unfolded the parchment on the table. It was pretty, watercolors, the two of them, like simple boxes sitting on a tree branch by the lake. Sene looked at it on the table, and then she picked it up to get a closer look. Sometimes, the children did this for her at Skyhold, but she’d never really understood it before, and she always met the gesture with confusion and self-effacement. But today, she was overtaken with love for this child and her simple painting. She seemed to have gotten used to her life.

“Thank you,” said Sene. “It’s really beautiful.” Her heart was full.

“You don’t have to lie,” said the girl.

“The Inquisitor has never once lied,” said Solas, and he smiled at the girl, and she seemed relieved and wide open now, and then the nice baker at the counter called her name, as her baguette was ready, and the little girl bid them both farewell and took her bread in its brown paper wrapping and went away into the cold of the outdoors.

Solas sighed. He looked down at the painting, and then he looked at Sene. She smiled at him, too. It was simple. He drank his coffee and sat there, chewing on her hairpin with his arm slung loose over the back of the chair. He was looking out the window, a beautiful man, she thought. He went through life these days caring about nothing but the stupid stuff, like the ice on the windows and the smell of the frost, and she was proud of him. Nobody’s a stranger, she thought as the world went around them in a well of Dalish children and winter reverie. She supposed that they had earned this.

She remembered this time when the Inquisition was new, and there had been this Templar at the Gull and Lantern who was giving them shit for being elves. He gave Solas shit for being a mage and threatened to take his head off with a claymore. Sene was pissed off, but she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know anything about this world and this place where people hated elves or this stupid war or Ferelden or anything. She had never really seen, never really been on the ugly end of it. But Solas was ready. He seemed used to it, even seemed to bring it on a little as he took whatever he’d been chewing on out of his mouth and tossed it to the floor and then calmly asked the man a question.

 _Purple, or purple?_ he said. He rolled up his sleeves as if preparing to wash his hands. It was the first time Sene ever saw him do that.

 _Excuse me?_ said the Templar, a brown tooth in his mouth.

Solas only smirked. _Nevermind,_ he said. And then he put the Templar face-first into the bar—so fast, and so hard, Sene hardly saw it coming. She just stood there, staring as the guy melted off to his hands and knees, coughing up his teeth on the floor, blood everywhere. Solas was like a dog playing fetch, very pleased with himself as he cracked his knuckles. He nudged the man with his foot to make sure he hadn’t accidentally killed him. Then he casually ordered a bottle of whiskey for the table. _Four cups,_ he said to the barkeep. Meanwhile, Varric and Cassandra sat bickering on the other side of the bar, totally ignorant to all that had taken place, and all of this—Solas's speed, his strength and sort of unpredictable bouts of danger hidden deep inside that carefully controlled exterior—it made him seem young to Sene, and interesting, and like, with him, anything could happen.

That night, when they got back to their camp somewhere in the hills, she held his hand by the fire and examined his knuckles and asked him whether, as a youth, he had punched things often.

 _What was that thing you said back there?_ said Sene. _Purple, or purple?_

He found this to be funny, though he didn't want to talk about it. He didn't seem so much like a puppy anymore, now that the night was ending. He seemed weary. He seemed like a man. But he still found it all to be so funny. She never got a straight answer that night, about his past, but what she did get was a tall man sitting beside her who was warm and smelled good, and he let her hold his hand for a very long time, and when they parted that night to sleep in their separate tents, he put the hair behind her ear, and it wasn’t the first time he’d done this, but it was the first time where it really…felt like something. Like they belonged here, like she belonged to him in some strange new way, and she wondered if others took notice, like the guards and the officers, or if it was just her, exploding inside like a billion-year-old star. _Goodnight, Sene Lavellan,_ he said to her that night, smiling. She went into her tent and almost screamed because she had gone from being this nobody farmer’s daughter resigned to some boring Dalish life she didn’t want—to being his. She went from never really knowing whether she’d like a boy for real to loving a man so much she thought she might die. She didn’t know what to do. She lit a lantern and tried to read some stupid book her stupid dad had given to her for the stupid ship ride to Ferelden. Going all the way back to the Conclave. It was about weird Andrastian cults, or something like that, these weird cults that would worship Andraste by cutting off their hair and placing it in baskets and sending the baskets down the river, never to be seen again. Why would anybody do that? Cut off their hair in sacrifice to a holy vessel then send it down the fucking river? She wondered if there might be people out there cutting off their hair right now and sacrificing it to _her_ , the Herald of Andraste, and the notion made her nauseous. She couldn't read the book that night. She couldn’t even make out the words anymore, knowing Solas was sleeping somewhere nearby. What was language? Who spoke? What did he dream about when he closed his eyes? Was it always the Fade, or was it ever simple pictures? Little journeys his brain would take to process the day?

They had been nobodies, once.

 

Sene vibrated on the way home. There was nothing wrong, thought Solas, but there was something. Something inside. He didn’t understand everything about Sene even still, as she had this kind of chimeric energy and so all he could do was stand still and try to predict her, and yet it was her speed and her unpredictability that drew him to her,  and in any case, that day, she seemed very tense. He put his arm around her when they got to the road and he was chewing a piece of bark. She put her head on his shoulder. When they got a little way past Caer Bronach the bells went off. They went off for a long time, and with them Solas slipped through a wormhole in his mind—time and space—and into some other reality. His brain still did that sometimes, when he wasn’t looking usually. It rarely shocked him anymore and usually happened when his attention to the current moment was drifting. He would see the present, the past, really fast glimpses. Sometimes he thought he could see the future but he knew that it was just patterns repeating themselves and coming to fruition in his subconscious. This time, as his mind wandered, he saw a summer holiday, and there were ribbons everywhere in his brain. The sky was big outside, and the room was warm inside, and he held a little boy over his head to help him reach something on the top shelf of the pantry back at the house. The boy was six years old, and he laughed, and he looked exactly like Sene’s father. Black hair, freckles, very blue eyes.

He surfaced. They stopped in the middle of the road and stood very still in the chilly air. You could hear the people up ahead around the bend, like a caravan, but they were alone. He looked at his left hand, the scars, some of them from thousands of years before, boxing in the Ring while Ghilan’nain watched from the pale lights with her elfroot and her long, blond hair. How he had loved her, once[.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8623606/chapters/29282754) Before the fall. What had happened[?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/22018667) Do you ever just stop to wonder, what the fuck happened[?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8623606/chapters/19774009) And then you give up. Because it’s nothing. It's this or that. Pancakes or pancakes. Purple or purple. The answer is not in the question. The answer is something else entirely.

He looked at Sene. He had figured it out.

“What’s the matter?” she said. She was holding a little paper sack. In it was a little bag of roasted coffee beans and also some hard cheeses. “Are you okay?”

“No,” he said. He felt her hair like an old friend, touching his wrist. “I mean, yes. I’m fine. How do you feel?”

“What do you mean?” She was getting impatient. She always did that. Still.

“Stand still.” He let go of her. He sort of adjusted her by the shoulders so he could get a better look at her, a better feeling. She was so tall, so bright, her hair extra red whenever it was winter. The snow was like a natural backdrop that made it all glowing and big and almost orange. He spat the bark in his mouth to the snowy earth, and then he studied her. His head felt strange and far away from his body, as if it had been removed and then sewn back on again, and in some ways, it had, and she was pretty that day like an apple and like every day, but this was something else. Like a bee buzzing in her brain. “Look at me.”

“I am.”

“Be calm, vhenan.”

“ _I am._ Why wouldn’t I be calm?”

“Because.”

“What the fuck, Solas?”

“Your energies,” he said.

“My energies?”

 _We are not alone,_ she had said. Little Sene in the Fade[.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/17374567) It is often posed that Solas and his vhenan can be seen as something different than simply man and woman. A wolf, a fox[.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/16972533) A god, a girl. A metaphor. He saw now, how many millions of ways he could have left her, nursed his depression, his loneliness, ended the world in a blind drunken rage. How many chances he’d had to dismiss this reality and return to Mythal. He wondered if Mythal would have even taken him back. Her whole heart changed by death, and now, she was so different. Last he’d heard, she was spending more and more time in Kirkwall. She lived at Hawke and Fenris’s place part of the time. She had a room with a simple curtain and a view of the promenade. She liked to buy fresh cut flowers and place them in water. He wondered if she had ever gotten to experience love in the mornings, to be happy when the sun comes up[.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/22650818) If she had found her dishwasher.

“Solas?” said Sene.

He looked at her. “Yes.”

“What the fuck?” she said again. She had dropped the little bag of coffee and cheeses and wrapped her arms around her whole body like she was extra cold. “Am I fucking dying or something?” She became frantic now. This was not what he had intended. “Is it my arm?”

“What?”

“My arm.” She showed him, that circular scar on base of her palm[.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/28055601) “Where the anchor used to be?”

“No,” said Solas. “It’s not. Why? Does it hurt?”

“Not right now. But sometimes, yeah. It feels weird.”

“This is not about your arm. Do not worry about that now.”

“Then what? What is it about?”

“I think you’re pregnant, vhenan,” he said—and when he said it aloud, he knew it was true. “You’re pregnant.”

The sky was clear, and back in the village, you could hear cheering and clapping, as if a parade had just come down the main drag. The city elves and their colorful paraphernalia and flags, their celebration of winter. Sene and Solas both looked up at the exact same time then to see a single yellow balloon floating off into the sky.

“What?” said Sene.

He looked at her, and he was smiling without thinking. But he saw that she was no longer looking at the balloon. She looked down instead and put her hands on her stomach as if this would yield some sort of result—either confirm or deny, but there was nothing. She was vulnerable, and he became concerned. The caravan up ahead was upon them now, headed toward the village. It was more city elves who looked like they’d come a long way—probably from Lothering. They waved, dressed in their pretty, bright winter fashions, but Sene would not look at them. She would not look up from the snow.

“Sene?”

“I’m pregnant?” she said. She looked up finally. Her hair was sticking up in every direction. "Are you serious?"

“What time of month is it?” He said, very soft. He took her hand. “For you. The middle, correct?”

“Yes, the middle,” she said. “I mean, I guess—I guess I’m late. But I’ve been late before[.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/23485371) I wasn't pregnant then.”

“You ran out of Morrigan’s potion on the ship from Rialto, right? You never made it back to the apothecary.”

“No, I didn’t. But it's so soon, Solas. Is that normal? For it to happen right away?"

“Yes. Why wouldn't it be?”

“Why can you feel it and not me?” she said. She clutched the fabric together at her torso. She was blinking a lot—rapidly into the freezing air.

“Because I’m me,” he said. “And you’re you. You wouldn’t feel it, not yet, vhenan. That is also normal. It’s okay.”

“Is this for sure?” she said.

He took a deep breath. He got closer to her. Together, they stood in the middle of the road. He put the hair behind her ear and the air was very chilly, but it was no bother. It was always winter for them in these moments, it seemed, and he tried to realize this in some way that made sense. But it didn’t. It was random. Her injury in the Emprise du Lion had been random[.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/17294326) It had been snowing at Skyhold when he told her about the miscarriage—random[.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/20021170) And now, it was random. The world did not work in mysterious ways, he was learning. Not if you paid attention. It just worked.

Her freckled cheeks were red and pricked by the season. He tried to maintain his sense of evenness and objectivity, as Solas. Then, he got down on one knee, and he pressed his ear up against her body, and he closed his eyes. It was just like Cole had said—after the first time when it all went bad. A candle, and a heartbeat, and a soul. The white wolf[.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/19727773) “Yes,” he said, still listening. It was there. It was very real. He took her hand. His knee was getting wet and very cold from the frost, but he didn’t care. “I am sure.” He looked up at her and he felt all the old feelings of his youth from before his father died, and all the good feelings that Sene brought to him now, and how it never went away. It just got deeper. Like an anchor. But Sene—she was Sene. She was always floating. She was freaking out. “Sene?”

“Yes?”

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Are you all right?” he said, feeling desperate all of a sudden. “Tell me the truth."

He was going to stand, but she crouched down instead, just to be near to him, and her heart beat fast. She looked right into him like she was digging in his soul, digging into his body, and it was both wildly uncomfortable and the most important moment of his entire life. She was starting to cry. How he loved her. “I don’t know, Solas,” she said. “I think so?”

“Please tell me what you’re thinking.”

“I’m scared,” she said, like she was surprising herself, but very earnest. What was she supposed to feel?

“What are you scared of, Sene?”

“That it’ll hurt,” she said. “That the baby will die.”

“Those are rational fears,” said Solas. “Those are normal fears that any pregnant woman might have, especially if they've gone through what you have. But you’re not alone. I'm with you. We'll get through it, Sene.”

“I know," she said. She nodded, reassuringly to herself. She squeezed her eyes shut and a little fat tear fell out. "I'm sorry. It's just a big surprise."

"Do not be sorry." Solas picked up her face in his hands and looked right at her, everything all full up between them, and at some point, it had started to snow. Big flakes, slow but steady, falling all around them, and he could feel it in his magic, like little vibrations in the Veil. He was awake.

"It's snowing," said Sene.

“Yes, it is," said Solas.

She sort of smiled then, like a firefly—pretty, but just a flash. She still had the tears going on, but she kissed him just the same. “ _Ara vhenan,_ " she said.

He touched his lips to her forehead, overcome. He helped her up, and she leaned on him, a little shaky. He tugged her firmly to his side. The moment they were on their feet, he suddenly became aware of the temperature as if winter had only just come the moment before. “Are you cold, vhenan?”

She nodded, sniffled. She was still holding one hand against herself, as if she were already trying to feel its movements, though that was months away. “A little.”

“Let’s go home[,](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7468581/chapters/24604293)” he said, and he leaned down to pick up the bag of coffee and hard cheeses, and he held her good and tight, and she held him back with both of her arms wrapped around his waist, and she was flooded with confusion and fear and excitement but she was safe with these feelings, like no matter what they could not overcome her, undo her, stick their claws in her, and he was there and he smelled good just like before and always and he was big and strong and wise and calm and patient and hers, still a little dangerous when he wanted to be, a little tipped over inside his own time-addled mind, but that was over there, that was the past, and the past was the past, and it was everything she loved about him so much, all the way since the very first time they touched, and now it was calm in the winter morning as the light from the sun shined big off the snow, and together, just like always, they pressed onward.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **END ******
> 
> Exit music: "Wagon Wheel" by Old Crow Medicine Show ([Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/track/359krpyCKcFF8SFvqWES9L?si=6etjHinXSfSt8iPOB9x4cg)) ([YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9RxDNY2vuk))

**Author's Note:**

> Acknowledgements:
> 
> As _The Dead Season_ was a labor of love that took me nearly two full years to complete, I would like to thank all of my readers for sticking with me for this long and seeing the story through to its end. I have grown to love Sene and Solas deeply, and I feel I know them almost better than I know myself. I never would have had the courage to finish this if it were not for your dogged readership and unending support.
> 
> My eternal thanks and gratitude goes out to everyone who has ever left me comments and kudos over the course of my adventure. If _The Dead Season_ has affected you in any way, please tell me so in the comments here so that I can respond and cherish your response. As I move on to new projects, know that I'll never forget your support and encouragement and kind words and feelings. This story has changed my life and my writing forever, and you are a part of that.
> 
> Special thanks to the following readers who have commented extensively and/or just been wonderful fans of this work and great friends to me: TheVikingWoman, Fairymelt, 5ftgarden, Amburu, Buttsonthebeach, Sasshole-for-Rent, and Nora's Pancakes. Your comments and support here and on tumblr have made my world a better place.
> 
> And very special thanks to TheVikingWoman. Going along on this emotional journey with you has been one of the most gratifying experiences of my life. Thank you for all of your time, and for listening to me and letting me complain and rant about my writing. Without your never-ending support and enthusiasm for the story of Sene and Solas, I might literally have never finished this thing. You will always have a piece of my heart.
> 
> Thank you again so much for reading, all of you. I cannot encourage you enough to leave me a little comment, no matter who you are, but only if you'd like. Know that even though this story is over, Sene and Solas will never leave my heart. I hope to write about them and their futures in small glimpses and already have some little pieces in the works. Come find me on [tumblr](http://galadrieljones.tumblr.com/) or subscribe to me here if you'd like to keep up.
> 
> You're all my favorite people. May your journeys take you to spectacular places, and I wish you well. <3
> 
> -gala


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